Review: Dell Mini 9 + OS X 10.5.6
There are already a plethora of online reviews and breathless unboxing videos of the new(ish) low-cost, high gloss, Dell Mini 9 netbook.
So here’s one more!
I ordered my black Mini 9, with 1GB ram and 16gb SSD hard drive, webcam and Ubuntu for just over US$300, thanks to a $50 off sale on Dell.com.
It took about 2 weeks to arrive, even though the estimated delivery time was a painfully long 4 weeks. It arrived via Fedex last Saturday morning, looking like this:
Underpants (American Apparel, I believe) included for scale.
After the inital boot, Ubuntu setup, wifi connection and web-cam funness and other mandatory new-gadget-bonding rituals, I decided to try out the Gizmodo method of installing OS X.
It didn’t work.
However flash forward about 48hrs later, at around 2am on Monday morning, I did have a fully functional OS X 10.5.6 netbook. My hairline was probably a few mm further back than it was a few days prior, but it was done.
Everything works; Sleep, iChat, CoverFlow, AirTunes, Apple updates, Time Machine (see iTimeMachine) and even a slightly slimmed down version of MS Office 2008.
My drama began when I could not, despite my well known super-nerd abilities, create a bootable OSX flash drive from any of the several 10.5 .dmg files that fell off the back of a pirate ship. Every attempt I made to ‘image’ or ‘restore’ the file onto 3 different flash drives failed miserably.
In the end, I used a program called CarbonCopyCloner to just extract the entire DMG image, file by file, onto the ‘OSXDVD’ partition. I then followed the Gizmodo instructions at step 12.
NB: In order to extract the DMG rather than image/restore it, I had to place a file in the partition prior to extraction, and then select the option of NOT erasing files already on the drive. This was the crucial step in creating a viable OS X 10.5 install drive.
I’m in the process of making a short video demo/review of my new franken-mac, so check back here again over the weekend. Feel free to leave me a comment if you want any more tips, or need help troubleshooting your own setup.
about 10 months ago
What do you mean by partition? Did you make an actual separate partition on the mini to boot from with the install DVD, or are you just talking about a directory on a usb stick? Also, any pointers on key words to search for on the back of the pirate ship? The only thing I found on that ship was 10.5.4. Thanks!
about 10 months ago
Firstly, 10.5.4 can apparently be updated to .6 via the standard Software Update method, once installed. I think i just searched for “osx retail” and looked for the result with the most seeders.
The partitions i was referring to were on on the USB drive. The boot partition needs to be FAT32 and the OSX installer partition needs to be Journaled (or whatever the mac format is called). Its pretty clearly explained in the Gizmodo instructions. You could also use two seperate USB drives, I found it easier to partition one and just use that though.
Good luck & thanks for the question. I’m typing this in a hotel room on my Dell Mini 9 Macbook right now! Its great.