It’s been roughly a year since I lost my faith in the Free Software Foundation. I’d long since been annoyed by juvenile derogatory names like the “Swindle” being used to refer to Amazon’s Kindle and place it on the same level as calling a certain Redmond company “Micro$oft.” While that was enough to annoy me, in July 2008 the group did something to infuriate me.

You probably don’t remember the Apple challenge. It came out shortly after the iPhone 3G, and the release of the iPhone 3GS was enough to remind me. Taken from the call to action, the event was to (emphasis theirs)…

… use Apple’s helpful online booking system (no registration required) to reserve time slots at the Genius Bar. There are currently 217 Apple stores in seven countries, giving us plenty of slots to book. We want as many people as possible to book slots this Friday, July 25, and Saturday, July 26. Why not book more than one?

Using the booked slots the participants are supposed to ask their Genius five questions about software freedom. Essentially the group called for a distributed denial of service on Apple. Slashdot covered this already and on second of two days that the action was supposed to happen. I can’t call it a protest when it’s more similar to petty vandalism, directed at the wrong people, doomed to be ineffective and maligns the customers they seek to convert. As someone who’s donated to the FSF and CLUE in the past I could not believe a group that claimed to represent my interests would stoop to such a level. I have since shifted my donations to EFF, Book Aid International and Doctors Without Borders.

I’m having trouble finding any results, or anything other than the initial call to action, the Digg post and the slashdot post. I think it’s safe to say that the action did not result in any sort of victory or significant disturbance.

My questions are thus:

• What was the goal of this exercise?
• Why was the denial of service to customers considered acceptable?
• Who was involved with organizing this action?
• Why has there not been a repudiation from the FSF or the DBD groups?

I’ve sent the folks at defectivebydesign a short e-mail that’s much less angry asking them if there’s any similar actions planned, what were the results, and why there was no repudiation. A friend of mine sent a much better letter to the FSF asking them to retract and apologise for the Apple challenge.

I’m eagerly awaiting any response from either group.

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I’ve now had enough time to come to an evaluation of my hackintosh. I used it exclusively for a month and upgraded it from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7. I’ve taken it through full charges battery charges by working at school with wifi. I’ve carried it around in my jacket pocket. My verdict is that it’s a hell of a value but it’s not going to replace my aging IBM ThinkPad X31. Instead it acts as a great supplement.

When I originally started hunting for netbooks I thought I would get a relatively large one with a ten inch screen and I’d wait until the dual core Atoms came out. The Atom dual core 1.6 GHz would easily outperform my ThinkPad’s 1.6 GHz Pentium M on Linux with a SMP kernel. Even Firefox is going multithreaded these days. I’d throw in 2 GB or more of RAM since DDR2 SODIMMs are cheaper than my ThinkPad’s DDR1 SODIMM and I’d wind up retiring my first and favourite laptop.

It didn’t work out that way. Dell’s Twitter feed let me know that they were dropping a $170 coupon on the Dell Mini 9. I knew that it was very compatable with OS X and playing with the operating system under VMWare had whet my appetite. I decided to compromise and go smaller, weaker and cheaper. It didn’t do what I originally wanted but still made itself very useful.

Build quality

There’s nothing flimsy about the netbook. The screen casing feels sturdy when I open and close it, there’s no obvious wear on the joint despite frequently opening and shutting it, the plastic is not separating anywhere. There’s only one tiny scratch on the edge when it was in my backpack and I was knocked off my longboard. (Yes, I was terrified for it, but it survived.) Keeping it in my inner jacket pocket along with keys has not harmed the finish. The black does easily smudge.

Performance

This was disappointing. Even under Windows XP it’s significantly slower than the 1.6 GHz Pentium M. Firefox tabs felt heavier, it switched between tasks more slowly, and was generally CPU bound. Under OS X things didn’t fare too much better. I ran Geekbench after a fresh boot. Nothing was loaded except the stock applications and QuickSilver. I received a score of 717, which puts it in the realm of the single core PowerBook 1.5 GHz G4.

Before that was the empirical test. I leant it to a friend of mine who concluded that it was similar in performance to his late model PowerBook G4. I suspect that this is due to the SSD and extra RAM. For day to day tasks it’s still workable. I was able to do my common browsing just fine, develop in vim, and watch standard definition downloaded television from both Hulu and BitTorrent. It struggled driving the external 1280×1024 screen with a maximized show, in flash the dropped frames were bad enough to make it unwatchable but under VLC it was tolerable.  Watching movies on the integrated monitor worked beautifully.

For developers who think that the Mini 9 is a cheap gateway into developing for Mac, I urge you to consider picking up a used first generation Intel PowerBook instead. The Core2Duo is much, much faster owing not just to the second core but out-of-order instructions. Struggling with Xcode on a netbook is not worth it. If you just want to use a Mac, this is a more accurate experience than running under VMWare with a bunch of kernel hacks.

Usability

I’m not a fan of the keyboard layout. The keys are large enough for me to touch type easily. I am grateful that the backspace key is reasonably sized, unlike on my ThinkPad,  but my model has the apostrophe/quotation mark key awkwardly placed. To the right of the space bar is the menu key, and to the right of that is the apostrophe/quotation mark key. You need to use the function key to get to keys I frequently use as a *NIX geek and programmer such as {, }, [, ], |, and \.

The new keyboard layout fixes the problem of the apostrophe key and some of the parenthesis. I’m not willing to plunk down the money on it yet, though, and prefer to cart around a five dollar USB keyboard if I think I’m going to be coding. I’ve learned to cope with the placement of the apostrophe when writing but I’m still very slow when using the other aforementioned keys due to having to hold down Fn.

Battery life

With wifi and bluetooth on using 10.5.6 I got an average of three hours, give or take twenty minutes. It was thoroughly disappointing at the time. The upgrade to 10.5.7 gave me an extra full hour so I can easily get three and a half hours, the best time I got was four hours and fifteen minutes. It’s still disappointing since other netbooks claim six and above hours battery life, but then I remember that OS X was not written with a netbook’s power profile in mind. I can always get a ludicrous 77Wh battery and skip the laptop/netbook stand if I need more juice, four hours is enough to get over the cruicial three hour lecture time at school.

OS X Compatability

As I mentioned earlier, there were no hacks needed to install 10.5.2. I just needed to install the bootloader. There were no hacks needed to upgrade to 10.5.6 using the combo upgrade. Almost everything works great, even the external VGA monitor works without a workaround, but hibernate still needs to be disabled and I can’t turn off bluetooth.

All of the function hotkeys save for the external monitor key work under OS X. The external monitor key results in a garbled screen, and it’s unnecessary since OS X automatically picks up the presence of a VGA monitor and enables it.

However, once I installed 10.5.7 I did need to do some mucking with DellEFI and reboot twice. The garbled screen and booting into safe mode would be enough to scare novices. It’s still a hacker’s toy and not a perfect clone you can give to your mother.

Last impressions

My hackintosh netbook wasn’t what I wanted it to be: It’s too small and too weak to be a replacement for my laptop, it’s battery life isn’t much hotter than my laptop, and it’s not the gateway into Macintosh shareware development that I thought it would be. The keyboard layout puts up a surprisingly big barrier to impromptu coding from the coffee shop. However, it is an incremental improvement over my laptop worth the $400 I spent, and it makes a very useful supplement. My laptop is always ready in my bag and my netbook is always ready in my jacket pocket.

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Space used and remaining on my 16 GB SSD after using these tips

Update April 3rd 2009: Added the section on removing the hibernate image. Saved me 2 GB.

My place is under renovation right now so I’m spending the next week either on couches or on a matress on the floor. When I’m borrowing room like this I need to conserve space so I took my hackintosh Dell Mini 9, and when I’ve got OS X installed on a 16 GB SSD the space saving constraint applies. With just the default installation I had roughly a gigabyte free, since when formatted to HFS+ the 16 GB disk only has 14.03 GB usable. I managed to get the install of OS X 10.5.6 down to about 8 GB. By the time I threw on my Macheist items and installed vitals like Firefox and VLC I was able to keep my system at 10.85 GB used, 3.18 GB free. Here’s how I did it.

Monolingual

This is best run immediately after you finish installing. Monolingual will remove languages you don’t need and also strip out legacy PowerPC code from Universal binaries. This free tool saved me 520 MB.

I suggest only running it once because it’s hard to keep track of the same options over several runs. You might find that later on you mistakenly delete something that you wanted to keep. In my case I decided that I wanted to keep Chinese and French, just in case I leant the machine to my friends whose mother languages were either of those, and I might accidentally delete those languages down the road if I keep using Monolingual.

Download: Monolingual from sourceforge (freeware).

Deleting the hibernate image and disabling safe sleep

Safe sleep means that when you sleep your machine by closing the lid, it writes the contents of the RAM to disk. In case you lose power it’ll restore the RAM. Unfortunately this takes up a lot of space. My 2GB of RAM means the hibernate image takes up more than ten percent of available space. Also, the hibernate image isn’t read properly when you’ve got OS X installed on the Dell Mini 9.

You can disable it by following this guide from the Hackint0sh forums.

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Removing printer drivers

I was poking around with the du -hs command to find out what was using the most space. It turns out that the Library directory was eating up roughly a third of my drive. I decided to investigate.

Most of the space was taken up by the Printers subdirectory. I was surprised to see that the PPD files made up the minority of that. I assume that the directories like hp, Brother, Xerox and the rest contained printer management programs. I didn’t need two gigs of that, much less for printers that I would never use. You can get rid of them by changing to the /Library/Printers directory and deleting the directories of the manufacturer’s you’ll never use with sudo rm -rf. Be careful about selectively deleting what’s inside the PPD directory if anything. I saved about two gigs this way.

Xslimmer

I saved just over a gigabyte of space on a 16 GB SSD thanks to Xslimmer

This application isn’t free, but I think it was well worth it. Thirteen dollars may buy me more storage in the form of a USB pendrive than I’m likely to save from this application, but the convenience of not having to carry another USB stick is great and the SSD tends to be faster than cheap USB storage.

Xslimmer works similarly to Monolingual in that it’s also used to remove legacy PowerPC code and unnecessary languages. It adds a few extra features on top of that. Xslimmer keeps a blacklist of items that can’t be modified due to things like copyprotection. You can keep exclusion lists. It keeps a tally of how much space you’ve saved so you can feel good about spending that $12.95. It keeps backups and automatically clears them out. Since most OS X binaries that you download are still Universal it’s worth keeping around.

Download: from Xslimmer.com (shareware, 50 MB cumulative limit, $12.95 to buy and remove limit)

What else should you do to your new hackintosh netbook?

For starters, you’ll want to install Quicksilver. If you don’t already have it be sure to include Growl. Quicksilver is an application that lets you use a hotkey to type up commands to open programs like Safari or Firefox or iTunes, and also use to launch programs. It’s much quicker than fumbling around with the trackpad on a small screen.

Download: from Blacktree (freeware).

Next, search for freeware! Check out versiontracker.com. They’ve got a great big directory of freeware.

After that’s all through you’ll be at the same point of enjoying your netbook as I am. I love my Mini 9 hackintosh.

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Update May 30th 2009: I gave my general impressions of the hackintosh after a couple months of use, including performance and compatability. The verdict is it’s comparable to a late model G4.

Update April 8th 2009: Once you have OS X installed on your netbook you’ll want to learn how to lessen its hard drive footprint. Once I deleted printer drivers I don’t need, the hibernate image, and with the help of Monolingual and Xslimmer I’m now running with 5gb free after installing the Macheist 3 bundle and a bunch of my favourite apps.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is presently the most compatible with Leopard out of all the netbooks. For twenty dollars you can upgrade it to 2 GB of RAM which makes it a very capable machine. As of this writing, everything but hibernate and external displays work perfectly after installing with a retail disk image. (There’s a workaround for the external monitor issue.) I managed to get a developer seed image of Apple OS X 10.5.2 running on my Dell Mini 9 and successfully updated it to 10.5.6. The folks at MyDellMini have some very helpful guides up. The one that I used was the DellEFI method.

The guide explains how to create a Chameleon bootdisk under Windows using syslinux. It also explains how to turn an OS X install disc into a bootable USB mass drive drive suitable for install, since it tends to be much faster and less error prone than installing from an external DVD.

What it leaves out is how to make the developer seed DMG bootable. I found out that I could do this using the demo version of Transmac. First you need to decompress the DMG. You do that by opening it by going to File and then Open Image. Find the developer DMG and it’ll ask you to decompress it. Click yes, and save it to a new filename. Next you right click on the drive you want to wipe, click Format Disk, then select Format Disk from Image. Pull up the uncompressed DMG and it’ll make a bootable image just like Disk Utility.

After that, follow the instructions in the MyDellMini guide.

Mac OSX 10.5.6 running on a Dell Mini 9

Unfortunately the Hibernate function won’t work. When you try to restore from hibernate it gives you an error and cold boots. Sleep works just fine on shutting the netbook. Once 10.5.6 is installed wireless and bluetooth work. I hear that the integrated webcam works too, but I don’t have one to test.

You might have noticed by now that the Dell Mini 9 doesn’t have F11 or F12 keys. Try Fn+Z for F11 and Fn+X for F12. If those don’t work you’ll need to install the A04 BIOS.

Once you’ve got all that set up you’ll want to start saving space. The worst offender is print drivers, which easily take up 2 GB of space. Deleting folders of manufacturer’s I don’t use from under /Library/Printers saved me a ton of space, and running Monolingual to remove PPC code and a bunch of languages saved me another 500 MB. At $13 US, Xslimmer is a good buy, especially since most applications you download are multilingual Universal binaries. Xslimmer can trim this out without worrying about getting your settings wrong on Monolingual just once.

Once all that’s through check out Macheist 3! Just for visiting their website you get a free copy of EventBox. I’m happy to get World of Goo, WireTap Studio and hopefully BoinxTV and Espresso for $37.

My Leopard-running netbook is quickly replacing my ThinkPad as my primary mobile computer.

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The decision continues by stating that this interpretation is consistent with the intent of the Copyright Act and Parliament, concluding that “to rule that digital recorders are not audio recording media does not serve the purpose of the Act or that of Part VIII [the private copying provisions]. It instantly makes the conduct of millions of Canadians illegal, and even possibly criminal.“

Take a look at the private copying section of the copyright act. Specifically, sections 80 and 82. Section 80 is what gives us Canucks the ability to copy for personal use. It says that “the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of … onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.” Guess what? Section 82 says that there’s a levy that must be collected on a recording medium. Without the levy on your iPod, private copying exemptions don’t apply when you copy to it. That’s what the judge meant when he said the conduct of millions of Canadians is illegal without it.

So why did Apple push to get rid of the levy? Most likely just to increase sales by lowering the effective cost to Canadians, but I bet leaving iTunes the only explicitly legal way to get music on your iPod wouldn’t dissuade them.

Dr. Geist goes on further to suggest that “given the Board’s view that the levy potentially applies to any device, including personal computers, it also provides further confirmation that peer-to-peer downloading is covered by the private copying levy.” That’s not to say that anyone with a computer is entitled to download over peer to peer right now. It just means that computers could be levied. Which brings me to another couple questions: Since I didn’t pay a levy on my hard disk is it legal for me to rip my CDs to it? Is peer-to-peer considered distribution?

There has been no news from Apple Canada related to the Apple iPhone. Since the phone is GSM only there’s just one network where it can work: the Rogers network. This leaves Fido the only other possible carrier. Neither carrier has confirmed that they will be carrying this shiny touchscreen hybrid. I’m left hopeful by Rogers subscribers who’ve emailed their CSRs and received back confirmation that Rogers is in talks with Apple. The Globe couldn’t dig out an official comment.

I’m not all that eager for an iPhone as a phone. I am eager for a push towards better mobile internet in accessibility, usability and price. Already the iPhone has shown itself to afford better accessibility. From the iPhone demo I picked out that it handles CSS fairly well and renders complex pages slowly compared to my laptop browser, but quickly compared to my old Toshiba e740 with either Pocket IE or Thunderhawk. I look forward to being able to ignore the “search only the mobile web” feature of Google. Forget wap 2.0, this phone can join web 2.0 as we know it and even its interface fits in.

There won’t be any Flash. There probably won’t be any iPhlash. Digg will lose a tiny bit of shininess and you can’t youtube. Kiss any flash centric page goodbye and welcome everything else. There are a great many pages that are optimized for mobiles but many more that aren’t. I’m glad that Google Reader and Mapquest are easily available on my phone. It’s a welcome break from the usual frustrations; I’ve never had a browsing session where every page I’ve wanted to visit has worked. I’ll be happy when I can hit Google News and click on highly ranked links for all of the day’s major stories without seeing a horrifically broken webpage.

To make the most of this phone you’ll need to pull down a whole lot of data. I’ve frequently complained that cellular data is far too expensive and the iPhone will use a lot of it. That may be why Cingular is requiring all iPhone purchasers to pick up a data plan. I’m hoping that it will be an unlimited plan similar to the hiptop plan and that Rogers will follow suit. My hiptop is going to die within a year and I don’t ever want to give up cheap unlimited mobile internet.

Wifi isn’t enough for me anymore. I have tasted ubitquitous internet access and I’m addicted. The iPhone could jolt providers into reasonable data rates, web site owners into rich and dynamic mobile pages, and give everywhere access to the mainstream. Apple, thank you for promising to disrupt. Even though I likely won’t buy it I await the iPhone landing.

Need more details:

• Can you buy it without the SIM lock?
• Is the battery user replacable? This feature is required in cell phones but still absent from iPods.
  
• It runs OS X. Um, what? Will applications need to be built specifically for the iPhone?
• The UI looks cool but I’d like to see more. What I saw was very polished. I like having the active call shown at the top when you’re in other applications, and I like how easily it handles interruptions due to incoming events.
• Can you listen to music on the Bluetooth headset? It’d be a nice fallback if I forget my headphones.

Now that’s refreshing:

• Accelerometers in a phone. How long until someone controls a Roomba with this one? I’d like to be able to flick my phone to bring up the on screen keypad.
• Proximity sensors. There goes a big annoyance from older Treos! It doesn’t accept touch input from a face, but bring it away and tap a button and it works fine.
• Multiple touch interface! I’ve been watching demo videos of these in schools for a long time. I’d love to be able to rotate a Google map with two fingers, stretch and pinch to zoom, or hit multiple buttons at the same time.

Cool stuff:

• Wifi. This is awesome for all mobile data addicts. EDGE is expensive and wifi allows for gobs of data that’d normally make me shy away. I can web browse instead of just using email.
• Quad-band GSM + EDGE. Great, 850 mHz is the most popular band here and I’d like to be able to use EDGE when it’s got better coverage.
• OS X based. This’ll be the first mainstream phone that’s based on a BSD environment!
• Landscape and portrait web browsing. I’m happy to see this is becoming a required feature in mobile browsers.
• Data and voice use at the same time. Hopefully it lets you use EDGE and voice at the same time, but wifi and voice at the same time will be sufficient.
• Very high resolution screen. So pretty..

Lame!:

• Cold shoulder for Canadians. When can we get it? Seriously, what the hell?

Apple, if you’re listening, please tell me when Canadians can buy this thing. Oh yeah. The same developer discount for computers applied to iPhone would be cool too.