Who could resist such a temptation? Particularly when a quick scan of the article revealed merely a hint of technical kink for someone with such a long and sordid technical past. So I quickly hopped onto the Dell site to place my order.  Unfortunately the systems were backlogged to late November, and searches elsewhere were futile.  So it was to be a long wait for release of my ever-building Nerdly excitement.

During the wait, I began to explore the community of Hackintosh sites, thrilled to see the plethora of crowd-sourced R&D on the topic.  Then rumors started floating around that the impending release of Apple's latest OSX update (10.6.2) would purposefully block support of the netbook-enabling Intel Atom processor, thus "breaking" any hackintoshing of cheap netbooks.  In essence, Apple found a pair of granny panties and wrapped Snow Leopard inside.  Days later came the inevitable release and the rumors were confirmed.  Buzz-kill.

The Hackintosh community was aghast and has been awaiting a "workaround" to appear from some 16 year old genious, but to me it was very simple.  Just install version OSX 10.6.1 and everything will be fine.

Last week, the little jewel of a Netbook arrived replete with Ubuntu LINUX - I enjoyed playing with the latest of consumer LINUX to satisfy my instincts that Windows was well on the path to irrelevancy.  But I must warn that the catchy littlesub-Saharan start-up tune quickly became an earworm.

1. Downgrading the BIOS.  Your Dell will arrive with a version A06 BIOS. It therefore will not work without some geekliness. There are very easy-to-follow instructions to create a USB boot drive to downgrade to A04.  Herman suggests you might have to do this.  The fact is you WILL have to.  You will need a PC and you will need to enter the pre-boot BIOS set-up menu (generally holding down the F2 key at start-up time).  You will need to type a couple of simple DOS commands.  All of this is very well explained, but if any of this slips the boundary from foreplay to gynecology in your mind - find a more tech-studly friend to do it.  

2. You MUST have a Mac still running Snow Leopard 10.6.1 (or .0). And of course a legitimate copy Snow Leopard 10.6.0 The preparation of the Installation Flash Drive must be done on this machine.  Including the magical addition of Netbook Bootmaker (use version 0.8.3 RC4)

The one problem I had was trying to do this whole operation on a 10.6.2 machine and it did not work.  Fortunately, I kept one Mac on the older version in anticipation of this special night and all went well on that machine.

3. Just a tip - print out the instructions read a few times but when you get ready to do it open the original article on the PC you will use to prepare the downgrade USB drive and on the Mac you will use to prepare the OSX Installation USB drive.  The article contains links with the various resources you need and with this little prep, you will have them handy at exactly the time you need it.

The process 

It goes pretty much as described.  I had a couple of glitches with the flash drives which we cured by formatting the one for the PC first (on the PC) and same for the one you will use on the Mac - pre-format it Mac, extended Journaled.  

You will find your Dell Mini 10V a very willing recipient of it's Mac-semination.

BTW - if monogamy is not your thing.  The Dell is strictly into open relationships.  You can indeed set it up to run, Windows, Mac, Linux or any combination thereof.  I think I am in Love.

Thanks to John Herrman for his outstanding detailed work on this article.