The suckage that is Dell Tech Support
As you may know, I bought a Dell Inspiron mini 9-Inch
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.
Entourage Rule to Filter Russian Spam
I'm starting to get a lot of Russian spam now. The good news is that I don't understand it, so I can't possibly fall for it. The bad news is that my junk email filters and even Postini are not catching it. I created a rule in Entourage that handles them.
Hackint0shing Dell Mini: it Works
In my previous post I left off without telling you whether or not I successfully hacked my Dell Inspiron mini 9-Inch
Basically, I wasted a ton of time trying to shoehorn Mac OS X
My total cost, door-to-door, was about $334. Not bad, but not the $200 netbook that everyone talked about.
Hackint0shing Dell Mini 9 on the cheap
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.
Case sensitive filesystems: The bane of Mac OS X
I now have a variety of applications that are incompatible with Mac OS X because I chose to install a case-sensitive filesystem 3 years ago when I got my Mac. Yes. THREE YEARS AGO. It has been possible to have a case sensitive filesystem (i.e., where files named READme, ReAdMe, and readme are all different files) for many years. Several major software vendors have been completely caught by this and failed to (a) account for it during development, (b) account for it in testing, or (c) provide any kind of solution.
The vendors that give me grief right now are:
- Logitech (Harmony Remote manager)
- Red Marble Games (Democracy 2)
- Adobe (Acrobat 9)
Now what really burns me up is that I just upgraded to Acrobat 9 from Acrobat 7 on Mac OS, and Acrobat 7 WORKED on a case-sensitive filesystem. It's a regression!