The fact that the Dell Mini 9 is one of the few netbooks out there that can run OSX has not gone unnoticed. And after hearing from one of the Adobe community folks that the method for turning a Mini into a “Hackintosh” really did work as reported, I was intrigued. So when an extra Mini crossed my path, I decided to give to a try.

The necessary ingredients:

One Macbook Pro, One Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD HD), One copy of OSX 10.5.6, One 16GB USB drive. Not pictured: a 2nd USB thumb drive for the bootloader.

How I did it: the “Two USB Drive” version described here.

It was actually quite easy. The only pain in the butt was getting the ISO of the OSX install disk onto the thumb drive — it took a long time. Other than that, though, everything worked as described. After the standard installation and setup process and a few reboots, I had this:

There was only about 2GB of free space left on the drive after installation, but Monolingual cleaned out almost 3GB of additional space. I used Xmark to sync my bookmarks onto Safari, threw on a copy of NeoOffice in case I need to do any basic document editing, and added Last.FM so I can listen to music without having to load any MP3s onto the Mini.

I haven’t tested the Bluetooth yet but everything else is working like a charm. I can stream videos, listen to music, check email, and do pretty much anything else I need to, on a machine that’s small enough to fit into my purse. I can even plug SDHC cards from my camera right into the Mini and then upload photos to the cloud. And I don’t have to put up with Windows to do any of it. The only drawback is the tiny keyboard on the Mini. It’s fine for a few emails but I wouldn’t want to use it for extended writing.

And yes, installing OSX onto non-Apple hardware is most likely a violation of the EULA (and may void the Dell warranty as well) so bear that in mind if you decide you want to give this experiment a try.

(Hint: Having a sweet little Hackintosh is worth it IMHO)