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OS X on a Dell Mini 9

April 17 2009

These days, my primary computer is a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s an amazing machine, but sometimes those 15” can be a little unwieldy (yes, that’s what she said).

Apple used to make a small, very portable laptop: the 12” PowerBook, which was unfortunately retired during Apple’s switch to the Intel platform. However, the transition did introduce the potential ability to run Mac OS X natively on non-Apple hardware. Whilst Apple don’t (currently) make their own netbook¹, a big community has sprung up around running OS X on non-Apple netbooks. I should note from the outset that installing OS X on non-Apple hardware potentially violates the OS X EULA. If you’re going to do this, in the very least ensure you own a legal copy of Mac OS X Leopard.

The current netbook au jour is the Dell Mini 9. BoingBoing’s compatibility list shows it as the only device that currently supports every piece of hardware² under OS X. And it does.

I bit the bullet and bought a Mini 9, which finally turned up a couple of weeks ago. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM (user upgradable to 2GB), and a 16GB SSD drive. I ordered it with Ubuntu pre-installed - and let me tell you, this thing is fast. Ubuntu boot time was a respectable 30 seconds, and the user interface felt extremely responsive. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen OpenOffice load so quickly. I’ll go as far as to say that out-of-the-box, this was the best experience I’ve ever had with Ubuntu - things just worked, which has rarely been the case for me with desktop Linux before. I put an SD card in the Mini 9’s SD reader, and it instantly mounted on the desktop; I plugged an external monitor into the Mini 9’s VGA port, opened the display settings, and was able to rearrange the monitors / change resolutions / etc; Flash in the browser worked without needing to install or fiddle with anything; heck, even wifi just worked. If you’re not comfortable with sticking OS X on there, the Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu is a lovely machine.

So, back to OS X. Aside from a few minor niggles due to my hardware setup³, installation was a breeze. This is one of the things that makes the Mini 9 such an attractive proposition as a Mac netbook - all of the wrinkles have been ironed out of the process by the clever group of people over at http://mydellmini.com. I won’t re-iterate the process in full here (I followed this guide), but in short it’s a case of:

1. Create a DellMiniBoot boot disc (either CD or USB) and boot from it.
2. Swap the disc with the Leopard installation DVD and tell DellMiniBoot to boot it.
3. Install Leopard.
4. When prompted to reboot, do so using the DellMiniBoot disc, and tell it to boot from your hard drive.
5. Once you’re in OS X, run the DellEFI application to install the fixes that’ll make sure everything works ok.
6. If you want two-finger trackpad scrolling, you’ll want to install these trackpad drivers.

It’s fairly straightforward, as long as you follow the guide. I had the odd problem crop up now and again, but a quick Googling saw me through - in particular, when rebooting after the installation, I had to boot into safe mode (using the -f flag) so I could get all the way through the post-install setup process. Other than that, it was pretty smooth.

The Mini 9 runs OS X beautifully. I’ve been using the Mini 9 a lot over the last 2 weeks and haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked.

Things I like

• Tiny and light.
  This is überportable. I’ve been chucking it into my work bag and taking it to the office with me every day. By comparison, I’ve taken my MBP in twice in the last 6 months because it’s just a hassle.
• Silent.
• Fast. Very fast.
  Fullscreen HD flash video gets a bit stuttery, but hey, this is a netbook. Streaming 480p H.264 movie trailers works brilliantly, however.
• Convenient.
  For small tasks around the house, taking to work, to a friend’s house, going home for the weekend, surfing in bed, and assorted other scenarios, this is a brilliant solution.
• A built-in SD card reader.
  Works flawlessly, and is extremely useful.
• Cute.
  C’mon, look at it! It’s tiny!

Issues

• Somewhat cramped keyboard on the right side.
  For some reason, our UK keyboard seems to have had an extra key squeezed into each row, meaning that the keyboard is a little more cramped than the US one. It took a little adjusting to - the tiny right-hand shift key, which is the one I usually use, was quite easy to miss at first.
• Screen size is a limitation in some situations, although for what I’m using it for it’s generally fine.
• I’ve had one occasion where the mouse didn’t work properly after waking, and one or two other assorted issues where it hasn’t-quite-woken-up-properly.
• Very very occasionally, it doesn’t boot (the spinner doesn’t appear on the boot screen). If that’s the case, just turn it off and on again.

One final point it may be worth making is that this is not a replacement for a full-size Mac. This is a netbook, and a compliment to an existing machine - don’t go thinking you’ll get the same experience you will from a full-sized MacBook, because you won’t. Rumours are that Apple may be creating their own netbook-like device to be introduced later this year. Time will tell whether this is true or not - I’d be very much interested to see Apple’s take on the whole netbook thing.

I was going to finish off by filming a walkthrough showing how well things run on the Mini 9, but Mr Andy Ihnatko does a sterling job of it himself:

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh Test Drive from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo

From WordPress to Jekyll

April 10 2009

Over the last week or so, I’ve migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll - a ‘blog-aware static site generator’, written in Ruby.

Jekyll takes a directory of posts and layouts, runs them through various converters, and produces a static website. Posts are stored in plain text files written in Markdown which makes it super easy to write HTML documents without the need to actually write HTML (and thus lose your flow). For example, making bold text is as simple as **this**. When Jekyll runs, it takes these posts, converts them into HTML, inserts them into an HTML layout, and produces a static HTML file. It’s really rather neat. If you want to see an example of how the back-end’s organized, check out this example of a Jekyll website on GitHub.

The main advantages, for me, are:

• It’s much faster than a PHP/MySQL based website like WordPress. You can’t really get much quicker than plain ol’ HTML files. There’s nothing for the server to process other than serving up the files the user requests.
• Posts are all stored in plain text files, which means they’re instantly accessible and usable anywhere I may want them - I don’t need to worry about having to export/convert posts from a database. I can also write my blog entries in my favourite text editor, TextMate - which is good, as I really don’t like blogging via a tiny textarea on a web page.
• Because the posts are in plain text, I can very easily version control my entire site; everything’s kept neatly in a Git repository and I can roll back to any previous version of any file/post if I need to.
• It’s ultimately a much simpler, smaller solution than using WordPress: I know exactly what’s in every file that makes up my website (and there really aren’t that many of them). WordPress is a much more complex system, and I really don’t know what half of it does or how it works.
• It makes blogging fun again!

One downside of static files is that this means that the site can’t run its own commenting system. However, I’m using Disqus (a javascript solution) which seems ok. It’s a little more intrusive than I’d like, but I can live with it.

Using Git allows me to automate the regeneration of my site when I write a new entry. I write the post in a local clone of the site’s Git repo (or, on my server if necessary), commit my changes, and push them to the master repository on the server. When the server receives the changes, a handy little Git post-update hook that I wrote pulls the changes into the ‘live’ repository, and runs Jekyll to regenerate the site. It’s rather cool.

Now to work on:

A. Writing more.
B. Writing better.

Instapaper Inconsistency

March 3 2009

I love Instapaper. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a really easy way to store articles that you come across online so that you can read them at a later date. Super simple, and with a nice iPhone app allowing easy reading on-the-go. Great stuff. Yesterday, Marco rolled out some new updates to Instapaper. Whilst I’d normally welcome any additions to this excellent service, some of these latest changes just don’t make sense.

Here’s how Instapaper used to work. Previously, you had two lists: Unread (all the articles you have yet to read) and Archive. Once you’d read something on your Unread list, it’d be automatically moved to your Archive. If you wanted to pull an item out of your Archive and into your Unread list, you’d simply ‘Mark Unread’ - makes sense, right? It’s the opposite of ‘Mark Read’ (which is essentially what you’re doing when you Archive). If you wanted to remove something permanently, you could delete it from either list (via a ‘delete’ link), and it’d be gone for good.

And here’s how Instapaper works as of today. I’m going to ignore the new ’Starred’ list, as that’s just fine - it makes sense and has no bearing on the issues I have with the other lists. Now, you have two lists: Unread (all the articles you have yet to read) and Deleted. Archive has now become Deleted. So now, once you read an article from your Unread list, it’ll automatically be deleted. Of course, deletion isn’t as scary as it sounds, as the Deleted list is essentially the same as your archive. Although, to me, it does sound scary - ‘archive’ sounds like a nice warm, fluffy place where my read articles are kept nice and safe for me to look at a future date; ‘deleted’ sounds like a temporary could-go-missing-at-any-moment kind of place. Your articles hang around in your Deleted list until you ‘Permanently Delete’ them. If you wanted to pull an item out of your Deleted list and into your Unread list, you click… ‘Mark Unread’. But wait, that’s what we used to click before! How is ‘Mark Unread’ the opposite of ‘Delete’? That does not make sense. Why would a Wookie live on Endor?

My problems with the Instapaper changes, then, are the following:

• Previously, Unread -> Archive -> Delete made sense. One could go back from Archive to Unread with ‘Mark Unread’. But now, Unread -> Deleted -> Permanently Delete does not make sense. One goes back from Deleted to Unread with ‘Mark Unread’. That’s plain inconsistent.
• Why is the archive of old, read articles (because, let’s face it, that’s what it is) called Deleted? The articles that are in there aren’t actually deleted at all. As proof of this, I have the ability to delete them even more from the Deleted list! Should we rename our Tumblr/Blog Archives lists to Deleted too? After all, these entries are also removed from our main view, and can be deleted further.
• Why is the ‘Delete’ link (to move an article to your Deleted list - where it should still be safe) identical to the ‘Permanently Delete’ link (where your article is lost forever) in all but tooltip? Two identical buttons that do very different things. Pretty dangerous, huh? Thankfully, the ‘Permanently Delete’ button does pop up a confirmation dialog to confirm our actions.

An article entry in the Unread list note the cross-in-a-red-box delete button.

An article entry in the Deleted list note the cross-in-a-red-box delete button.

I love Instapaper, and use it every day. I even bought the Pro iPhone app because it’s so darned good. But I’d urge Marco to reconsider these changes. Archive makes far more sense, and is a much happier place for my read articles to live than the wilds of Deleted.