Just a quick follow-up to the post on setting up my Dell Mini 9 hackintosh. It’s a great little machine. Yes the keyboard is small and some of the keys are in odd places, but not odd enough to keep me from using it.

Stats: Dell Mini 9, OS X 10.5.7, Safari 4

Having found right away that I needed, wanted, Copy and Paste function keys, I sorted that out. So Command and Control keys work just fine.

I’ve experienced a couple of crashes, but no more frequent than when I was running Ubuntu. Shutting down and restarting is only a minor inconvenience since 1) boot time is quick, and 2) most of what I do is either on the Web, or because I habitually save often, is not at risk.

The most noticeable improvement over Ubuntu is scrolling in the Web browser. Safari is much smoother and offers more control.

I’ve also found the Dell to be pretty rugged. Dropped and kicked on a concrete sidewalk resulted in just a few minor scratches.

Verdict on the Dell Mini 9 Netbook? It makes me happy.

I just finished hackintoshing my Dell mini 9. I’ve looked at methods described by a number of people, but settled on this method from mechdrew (Drew Mecham). It doesn’t require a Windows machine for USB formatting, or an external DVD drive. I just needed 2 USB drives, 1 for the OS X installer (I had a 5 license family pack) plus additional software from mechdrew’s download page, and the other drive for the 10.5.7 incremental update.

It’s pretty easy if you don’t do what I did. Make sure that second USB drive is inserted at the beginning of the process. I had to start all over again, but mechdrew’s instructions are very detailed and easy to follow. The only thing I didn’t understand from them, but became apparent during the process, was the command for booting in OS X safe mode. You should see “-x” on the screen. I followed his direction a little too literally and tried the command for “- -x”. That ain’t it.

Sleep works, Wifi works and seems to connect much faster than when I was running Ubuntu, and as far as I can tell…well, it just works. Thank you Drew Mecham!

Copy & Paste

I found with my Hackintosh, and then read elsewhere, that one drawback is that keyboard shortcuts don’t work. It turned out to be an easy fix. Just go into System Preferences and select Keyboard & Mouse ->Keyboard -> Modifier Keys… Then change the selection for “Control Key” from “Control Key” to “Command”. It should look like this: