A few weeks back, I ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 as a backup/spare laptop.  The order was inspired by Tisha’s laptop giving up the ghost unexpectedly, and us realizing that it would be nice to have some sort of viable spare in situations like that.

I didn’t want to spend a lot, and the price was just right on these things.  Plus, I’d learned back in October that there was a successful path to getting OS X running on those things, and it became a lot more attractive an option.

I ordered mine configured with Ubuntu, a 16GB SSD, 1GB RAM, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam.  For reasons that are not entirely clear to me right now, I didn’t include bluetooth.  In any case, after all was said and done, it came out to less than $500 shipped — a bargain!  Of course, a week after I ordered it, Dell started offering 32GB SSDs for an additional $25.  I have a knack for that sort of thing.

I ran it as an Ubuntu laptop over the Thanksgiving break, and I generally got by just fine with it.  I’d ordered a new 32GB SSD from a third party and was going to put OS X on that.  It arrived last night, and to my chagrin I discovered I’d ordered something that won’t fit my laptop.  (Want it?)  So I gave up, ordered the right part (which is on backorder) and plugged away getting OS X onto the existing 16GB SSD.

This guide is pretty much spot on.  Using a cobbled-together USB DVD-ROM (made from a desktop IDE DVD-ROM drive mounted into an old USB hard disk enclosure) I booted the custom boot ISO for this laptop, then used my 10.5 retail copy of Leopard.  For reasons unclear to me, I could not get my 10.5.4 copy to work — perhaps Apple changed the format of the disk.  No worries, the install went flawlessly, except the bit at the end where it says it failed, but that’s to be expected.

After another reboot, installing the 10.5.5 combo update, then running the remaining scripts on that page, I had a reasonably working OS X laptop.  The caveats are:

  • Say no to installing two-finger scrolling.  It crashes the AppleScript with an error, and therefore doesn’t finish the install.  Subsequent runs of the tool worked when I said “no” to that option, and I got my sound.
  • If you have a 16GB or smaller SSD, don’t try to sleep the laptop.  It isn’t terribly reliable and could lead to kernel panics.  I expect this to go away once I get my 32GB.
  • I’ve read the SDHC support isn’t quite there yet.  The biggest SD card I have at home is 2GB, which I’ll try tonight.  I have a 16GB card on order, and will see how that performs.

Noteworthy:

  • This thing can operate dual headed.  I hooked it up via VGA to the 19″ LCD on my desk at work, and got dual headed display with 1024×600 (native) on the laptop screen, and 1600×1200 (native) on the external.
  • iChat works just dandy with the integrated web cam.  It’ll also use the webcam to snap your picture during setup just like a regular Mac.
  • I’m not 100% sure, but I think the OS X install changed the MAC address for my wireless.  I need to investigate that more.
  • Spaces, Time Machine, etc. all work as you’d like them to.
  • It automatically swaps the Alt/Windows keys so the key next to the spacebar is Command (like on a regular Mac).
  • I installed all the software updates that were waiting after the 10.5.5 Combo (except hardware-related ones like the Airport updates), and everything seems normal.
  • Flash works great.  Youtube plays just dandy in its regular window.  Fullscreen might be a bit jumpy — I haven’t decided if it’s the machine or the net at this point.

Photos can be found here.

I also have a 64GB SSD on preorder.  I think with a larger SSD and some decent storage this could make a completely viable travel & light use laptop.  I couldn’t do serious work on it, of course.  I’ll be spending a good chunk of my weekend working on huge OmniGraffle documents, and this little puppy isn’t going to cut it for that.  I’ll use my real MacBook Pro or my beefy Psystar Mac clone for that work.

But for reading mail, giving slideshows, browsing web, and SSH sessions, it’ll do quite well.