Sleeping Monkey

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Converting the Dell Mini 9

So, the Dell Mini 9 came with Ubuntu 8.04 on it – and our challenge for after work today was to get Mac OS X running on it – and we thought we’d found some pretty foolproof guides and examples, so we gave it a go.

Firstly, the Mac image on the USB stick refused to boot properly, and would only get as far as displaying an Apple logo before hanging. But we soon fixed that by booting with the -v (verbose) option enabled, and for some reason that seemed to work.

Once it had installed, we had to reboot, still using a funky way of booting via Syslinux installed on a USB stick, and go through the first-install registration process of OS X. When that was done, and we’d run a couple of pieces of software available from the guide we used, we rebooted without the Syslinux, and …. voila! A working OS X installation on a Dell Mini 9. The rest of the evening was spent tweaking OS X to work just the way I like it.

Some photos of the installation are here:

The only issue so far is that you cannot tap the trackpad to click, you have to use the buttons; but I am fairly sure there is a fix out there somewhere waiting to be found. Other than that, it all went smoothly – the wireless and ethernet work, as does the bluetooth, the display, the sound, any external monitors, the function keys, etc… everything as you would expect. Excellent!!