Hackintosh!

January 19, 2010 - Chris Ng

I'm a little late in posting this (it's been a slow blogging month) but sometime in December I finally hopped on the bandwagon and installed Snow Leopard on my Dell Mini 9 netbook (which sadly is no longer available).

I followed this excellent guide with some caveats, which I'll talk about below. I just want to say thanks to the smart industrious folks that keep the hackintosh community going. Without you there would be... umm, no community.

I have a Macbook, so it was relatively easy for me to install the Snow Leopard (family pack) DVD from my DVD drive. It's worth mentioning that most netbooks don't have an optical drive. Now the normal procedure would be to restore the DVD to a USB flash drive, run NetbookInstaller, then boot from that onto the netbook.

What I did instead, was to install from the DVD onto an external hard drive, and updated to 10.6.2. I ran NetbookInstaller, then connect it to the netbook and boot from it. I then used Carbon Cloner to copy the whole kit and kaboodle to the internal solid state drive (SSD) and voila!

I disabled hibernate and deleted the sleep disk image and freed up a whopping 2Gb (I have 2Gb of RAM). After a little more slimming using Monolingual, removing unused applications (e.g. Photo Booth as I have no webcam on my netbook), screensavers, desktops, and dictionaries, I had about 3.0Gb of free space! This is much more than the paltry 1.3Gb left over when I installed Leopard 10.5.6.

So far so good. Everything works except for the internal microphone, but there is a kernel extension fix that I haven't done yet. I don't know if I'm going to do any hardcore development on it, but I've read that Xcode runs ok on it. If I go that route, I'll need to move some directories over to an SD card. Since I have a 16Gb SDHC to dedicate to the card reader in the netbook, I might give this a try. In the meantime I'll be storing most of my data in the cloud. After all, it *is* called a netbook :-)

Has anyone else made a netbook hackintosh? I'd be interested to hear about your experiences.