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I am writing this post from my mother in law house using my new Mac Netbook from Dell. Yes, you are reading this right, I am using a Dell Mini 9 Netbook running OS X 10.5.6 coupled with my Apple iPhone running Nullriver Netshare app as my portable 3G internet access.

The whole thing run exceptionally well. I have been following threads from mydellmini.com to come up with an effective way of installing OS X 10.5.6 on the 8GB SSD drive of my Dell Mini 9. I decided to buy the unit at my local Best Buy store as they had it on sale for 379.99 (in white like all Apple MacBooks). This is probable like 299 US$ for an Netbook running OS X. Really not bad.

My biggest challenge was to find a way to make the OSX install to fit in the 8GB drive of the Dell… (I wish Best Buy had the 16GB version in stock). Believe it or not but the OS require 37MB more than is available on the Dell so a straight install from a retail OS X DVD is not possible on the 8GB Dell Mini.

I had to use my Apple iMac to install a bare minimum OS X 10.5.0 on an external USB drive. I then booted back on my iMac and applied the 10.5.6 combo update to the USB drive installation. The size of the whole thing was well beyond the 8GB limit.

I removed all the applications and utilities I never used, all fonts I never used and all voices and screen background (with the exception of one). That still was not enough to get enough headroom on the 8GB SSD.

I decided to buy a very useful application called Xslimmer. This application remove all non intel binary and undesired languages from the applications on your Mac. Using it I was able to reduce the installation by another 1GB or so.

As I write this post my Dell Mini 9 Mac Netbook sit at a comfortable 5 GB of disk usage with about 2 GB of free space for other applications and other goodies. Why 5 plus 2 does not make 8? Because there is roughly 1 GB lost in the conversion between HD vendor advertised disk space, the way the OS calculate actual GB and the overhead of the journalized HFS+ file system.

The current state of OS X hacking required to make this work on the Dell Mini 9 is pretty advanced. The state of the art solution is known as a Type11 installation and involve a bootable DVD that act as a boot loader to the retail OS X DVD. With this method you essentially use an unmodified Apple DVD to install the OS. The boot loader merelly provide a way to boot the retail DVD on the Dell Mini 9.

Because the Dell is so close to an actual MacBook most of the features are working flawlessly… thanks to a lot of research and development made by the OSX86 community out there.

The Dell Mini 9 is, in some aspect, a better Macbook than the real one I also own. For example, opening a CIFS share take quite a while to do on my real Macbook… but on my Dell Mini 9 Mac netbook it almost happen instantly… I really can’t explain why but it is a fact.

Most things work flawlessly… but others are not yet perfect… for example after resuming from sleep the sound no longer work. I am sure a solution to this will be found in the next few weeks. It is the price to pay for a 300$ Mac Netbook… and at that price I am willing to leave with it.

Is the Dell Mini 9 a threat to Apple? Most likely not. It is in fact more likelly to accelerate the coming out of a real Apple netbook as Apple might start to notice that people are hungry for such a thing.

Until then I will keep enjoying my self made version of it.

Update 20090109:

I figured out why me shares where faster on the Mini… My iMac was installed with 10.5.0 then with all the subsequant incremental up to 10.5.6… somehow lingering network issues of 10.5.0 never went away. I did a fresh install of 10.5.6 last night and now my real iMac is as fast as my Dell Mini for CIFS!!! Yeah!

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