Hackintoshing

GWC Community Geek Hobbies
#1

I recently dropped about $400 (including shipping) on a Dell Mini 10v and installed a retail copy of OS X Snow Leopard on it using this guide from Gizmodo.

The results have been pretty cool. It’s not a very powerful computer, but it’s great for casually browsing the web and checking email. My wife and I mainly got it for travel, we can take it on a plane ride and watch a couple movies on a single battery charge. We’re taking a trip to Vegas in June and can’t wait to try it on the way.

Has anyone else here built or purchased a computer for the sole purpose of hackintoshing? If so, how were your results?

#2

That looks pretty cool. Does Apple’s Software Update work properly on a hackintoshed box like that?

#3

Yes, the only caveat is that some things (like sound) will not work after an update. This is due to the update process overwriting some non-apple drivers (ones that the Netbook BootMaker puts onto the USB flash drive), drivers that allow things like the audio and touchpad to work. These can be restored after updates are run, however, by doing the following:

  1. Open the Finder.
  2. Click Go, then Go to Folder.
  3. Type “/Extra” (without quotes, but WITH the slash at the beginning) and hit enter.
  4. Run the UpdateExtra program (must be an admin).

After that, a quick reboot and everything works again.

I’ve been quite impressed, aside from the thing not having a ton of horsepower (and this is to be expected with the Atom processor), everything works great. Even the webcam. I’ve seen issues with putting the netbook to sleep by clicking the Apple icon, it doesn’t seem to come back from sleep. However, you don’t even need to use the conventional means of putting it to sleep, because just closing the netbook will put it in sleep mode, and opening it back up will restore it from sleep with no problem.

This won’t be a multitasking powerhouse, but it’s a great internet-browsing and video-watching device, with great battery life, and looks to be ideal for travel.

Knowing the limitations of the device (slower processor) and planning around it can help you maximize your experience. For instance, I’m using Google Chrome for Mac for web browsing, and a terminal-based email client called mutt for email.

#4

I’m just waiting on getting finances together and then hopefully I’ll be getting a 10v to do exactly that with it. I want a very portable device for doing remote support from. Although it might be easier to keep it Windows for that, I’ve wanted to have a mac for ages, and this is a good bridging solution :slight_smile:

#5

This on my to-do list as well! I look forward to hearing how it goes.

#6

I wiped my 10v several months ago and am now running Linux on it (with a small Win7 partition for Netflix streaming). Long story short, I accidentally installed a system update without updating the hackintosh tools contributed by the community, and ended up without Atom processor support, which made the computer un-bootable. I decided it really wasn’t worth my time to have to pay such close attention and constantly play whack-a-mole with Apple updates. I’m much happier with Linux in general, MacOS was just extra eye candy. Pretty eye candy, but eye candy I can live without. My wife wants to get a Mini, maybe I’ll put MacOS on there for her.

#7

Yeah, I hear you. Jailbreaking/unlocking an iPhone involves a similar cat and mouse game with updates that are really downgrades. The only nice thing about the jailbreak community is that the dev team likes to make geeky scifi references in its blog posts about new updates. Like when they compared the back-and-forth with Apple to the famous scene from Wargames and when they posted a “It’s a trap!” warning when iOS 4.1 came out.

#8

No cat and mouse game, I simply don’t update my phone until there’s a JB available. My jailbroken phone is faaaaar more capable than my non-broken phone, and it’s rockin’ my cazbah.

#9

Yeah I typically don’t update until there’s a way around Apple’s artificial restrictions, but in the case of my hackintosh netbook I inadvertently installed the 10.6.3 update (thought I left it unchecked but apparently I didn’t).

I’m much happier with Linux on this netbook than I ever was with OSX. I use a lot of command-line tools on a daily basis, and the majority of them aren’t part of the standard toolset that gets installed with OSX, so I end up needing to install MacPorts (OSX version of the BSD Ports build system) and compile a lot of software from source. While this might not be such an issue on a more powerful desktop running OSX, it’s not really feasible on a netbook, as the CPU is not nearly as powerful. With Linux I have the benefit of these same applications being available in pre-built software packages that can easily be downloaded and installed in a matter of minutes.

Along with my home server which I recently set up (thread forthcoming) I’ve done some pretty darn cool things with my home network in the last couple months.