Dell Mini 9 netbook

[burble]

On a bit of a whim a week or two ago I bought myself a Dell Mini 9 Netbook, primarily for a small machine to take to work with me so that I could do personal stuff on my own machine.

It's quite a nice looking little machine. The lid will attract finger prints like there is no tomorrow but what the heck:

The keyboard and touchpad are small, bordering on usable and I struggled with the keyboard a bit at first but I'm used to it now:

For a netbook it is nice and easy to upgrade. Under a panel on the underside (held in with two screws) are the RAM, SSD (no moving parts in this machine), WiFI card and depending on what model you bought an HSDPA module.

The machine came as standard with 1Gb RAM and an 8Gb SSD. I've upgraded that to 2Gb RAM (the most the chipset will support) and a Runcore 32Gb SSD. The Runcore units are quite a lot faster than the STEC units Dell supply. They also have a micro USB connector should you want to connect them to a PC.

When POSTing the thing identifies itself as a Dell Inspiron:

For me, this is the part when it gets a bit more interesting. The Mini came pre installed with a custom build of Ubuntu Linux 8.04 which I wasn't keen on so after playing around a bit with Ubuntu 8.10 Netbook Remix I settled on this particular operating system:

It runs OS X and it runs it extremely well. Everything works - the webcam, bluetooth, wireless, ethernet and so on. I did need to faff about a bit to get the keyboard mapping how I liked it but that only took about 10 minutes.

Pressing the 'About this Mac' option on the menu tells me that this 'Mac' is running OS X 10.5.6 on an 1.6Ghz Intel Atom with 2Gb RAM:

Sorry about the poor pictures (especially the last one), it seems the camera on the BB Bold isn't all that great. I should also apologise for the ugly git in a couple of them.

[wytco0]

So how did you install OS/X on it?

I am a fan on OS/X but only on my mac..... so far ..................

Its not April 1 is it?

[burble]

No, it's not April fools day - those pictures are 100% real.

There is a big community of people working on installing OS X on non Apple hardware, or Hackintoshes as they're called.

The instructions for installing OS X on the Mini 9 are here.

[wytco0]

Interesting, I will have to see if I can install it on my eee 1000H.

Thanks for the pointers.

[bells0]

That's pretty damn cool!

[Rachel]

That's one very nice little unit.

How is the build quality? Is it solid, or does the case and screen flex (or just move) when you hold it?

[burble]

Build quality is surprisingly good. It feels very, very solid with no flex anywhere.

The bottom part is light enough and the hinges are strong enough that you can hold it by the screen bezel and turn it upside down and the screen stays open - the keyboard part doesn't budge.

I'm very impressed with the unit, it runs OS X very well and I'm even used to the keyboard now.

One odd thing is that if I'm using the ethernet interface Time Machine doesn't work as it can't find the TC. My TC is called 'Pomme' but when I browse the network using ethernet it sees a Windows machine called 'Pomme.' No biggie though since I can't see me using the ethernet interface very often.

The SD reader is SHDC compliant which is a bonus, so I've got a cheap 16Gb SD card in there which I'll put movies and the like on to keep me occupied on flights.