I’m in the UK for a couple weeks, so I got a T-Mobile GSM Broadband adapter. (This is the one from ZTE, by the way, apparently they offer several). Rather than hook into the OS in a nice, neat way, they include their own crapware that you have to install. Danger: If you install the software on Snow Leopard, it will ruin your OS and make your system unable to boot. Read on. Read more…
As you may know, I bought a Dell Mini 9 to hackint0sh it. I got it running Mac OS X with only a little difficulty (mainly around trying to shoehorn OS X onto a tiny SSD). Then the Wi-Fi card went out. Now, I’m stuck in Tech Support Hell. Read more…
In my previous post I left off without telling you whether or not it worked. In the end, I bought a 32G SSD chip and installed it. (Installing is totally painless and trivial). After that, the Gizmodo instructions worked perfectly.
Basically, I wasted a ton of time trying to shoehorn MacOS X into an 8G SSD when it just wasn’t going to go. I also realized that, if I were to make it work, the system just wouldn’t be all that useful. I would have had maybe 1G free for applications and music and movies and such. With the 32G SSD and a healthy selection of apps, I still have 20G free.
My total cost, door-to-door, was about $334. Not bad, but not the $200 netbook that everyone talked about.
When I read about getting a Dell Mini 9 for $200 and hackint0shing it to run Mac OS X, I was all over it. I ran out and got one. I was a bit frustrated that it required some stuff that would put my total cost over $200. (I got a video camera on the Mini 9, which already put my actual cost at $244, delivered). Specifically, I didn’t have a USB DVD and I didn’t have an 8GB flash drive. Those were the two alternatives mentioned in the Gizmodo article. They also said it would be pretty straightforward if you had the 16GB hard drive on the Dell, but I elected to keep the cost low and get the 8GB disk. I decided to see if I could do it with just my 4GB USB stick and the 8GB SSD. Here’s what I did and how it turned out.
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