My Dell Mini 9 gets a new OS

A while back I purchased a Dell Mini 9 with the sole intent of turning it into a Hackintosh. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s the name given to machines that aren’t Apple products but are hacked to run OS X. I’ve had this little machine running Leopard ever since the day I got it and it even lead me to purchase a Macbook a few months ago. OS X is a great operating system and I can’t say I’ve ever been happier with a computer than I am with that.

Unfortunately the purchase of the real Mac left my poor little Dell sitting in the case 95% of the time, relegated to occasional use via tethering to my Blackberry for when I needed something off the internet but didn’t have a wifi signal.

Last night ended with me wiping the hard drive and installing Ubuntu 9.10 which I believe is currently in Beta form. I’ve been using Linux for several years, my web server runs it, my home server runs it, and at one point, I had 3 laptops running it as well. The introduction of the Macintosh reduced me to 2 servers running Linux and nothing else. For a tinkerer like me, eventually that’s going to need to change.

So now I have a little 9" netbook running Ubuntu with no discernible issues that I can find other than it’s not auto mounting my SD card but I haven’t had time to check into that yet. It’s good to see that fact that Dell ships Ubuntu with a lot of their machines means that Ubuntu just handles most of the Dell hardware without any problems. No issues with wifi, blue tooth, etc.. it just works.

Oh Linux, how I missed thee.