You really do need to have a Mac involved. Unfortunately, with my hackintosh dead, it took a while to find a Mac user willing to help me out. When you do, the Snow Leopard install is much easier than the old DellEFI method. It involves restoring the Snow Leopard DMG file to an external hard drive or flash drive, then running NetbookBootMaker.app on it. There’s a lot of things that have changed. It’s now trivial to make the boot disk, it’s easy to do off a single flash drive, the install patch now includes a bunch of kernel extensions for netbook users, and it disables hibernate so that you don’t need to worry about crashing.

It doesn’t delete the hibernate image though, so for convenience, here’s how you do it:

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

Now, is it worth upgrading for a netbook user?

I have a lot more space after a fresh install of Snow Leopard than Leopard

Yes!  First off, it gets rid of the nasty security vulnerabilities present in 10.5.7, and it doesn’t cause the battery problems that are present in 10.5.8. Next, the filesystem improvements have given me an extra gig of space on my 16 GB SSD, and the install is slimmer. Before I was happy with 5 GB free after my install. Now I have 8.57 GB free after an Xslimmer run. And I haven’t even touched Monolingual yet. Supposedly the built-in applications like iCal, iChat and Mail are all faster. I don’t know. I never use them. Having an “Applications” button on the dock is a welcome change.

My tips on saving space are still useful. This time I skipped the need to remove any print drives because I did a custom install and unchecked print drivers. I’ll install them as I need them.

I have not noticed a speed increase, but I do have more breathing room when it comes to hard drive space. I might give it another go with Geekbench to see how it compares to Leopard’s score.

The only downside I’ve discovered so far is that LyX’s 1.6.4′s autosave feature is broken under Snow Leopard. It looks like they’re shooting to have the fix ready for 1.6.5. Until then I’ve got autosave turned off, and the crashes are much less frequent. Shame on Apple for breaking POSIX compliance. The other problem is that the mic jack takes some fiddling in order to get working, but I tend to use a USB headset anyhow.

Netbook users should certainly upgrade, and then immediately update to 10.6.1. Non-netbook users might want to check to ensure that their critical applications don’t have compatability issues first.

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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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