My first hackintosh!

So I posted a pic after I got it working, but figured I would go ahead and do a little writeup of my first experience with a hackintosh. I had done some reading on the subject because I've been interested in having a netbook for a while, but Apple is too busy making niche-y iPads and iPhone that lose reception if held "wrong" and aren't that great at taking fall. Since it doesn't look like an Apple netbook will be a reality any time soon, I figured it was about time to just do it myself!  From my reading, the Dell mini 10v was a pretty good choice, and, since it is popular for this application, I figured there would be plenty of support out there. I found a refurbished one on the Dell site for ~$230 and a few days later it arrived and I was ready to begin! I started out with the How-to guide for making a hackintosh Dell mini 10v on Gizmodo, then also used the guide provided in a response in this forum post.  Both were pretty helpful, but neither fully got me where I needed to be. The first big issue I had stemmed from a response to a comment on the Gizmodo how-to.  Someone asked if you needed a retail copy of OSX or could use a disc that comes with a new computer.  The author said the latter is fine, but after many fails, I made a post in a forum and found that not to be the case.  So I went out at got a retail copy of OSX Snow Leopard (only $29!!) and that covered the first hurdle. After that came the interesting part.  Now I'm pretty familiar with computer (you know, getting a Ph.D. in computer science and all), but I still don't understand how things work sometimes.  Anyhoo, I will get to that in a second. So first I took a usb external (they recommend >8 gig) drive and used disk utility to "restore" the single partition I made on it using the "image" of the OSX install disc.  Then I ran netbook bootmaker to make the drive bootable by my netbook and the result was an external hard drive that would act like the install disc.  I had to do this because the little 10v doesn't have an optical drive. So then it was just booting with the drive, installing OSX, then the part where I'm not really sure how it worked, but it eventually did. In addition to the netbook bootmaker I mentioned earlier, they also make a netbook installer.  This serves to basically clean up the OSX installation to make it more tailored to the netbook (some drivers that are needed, a fix to keep from kernel panic since Intel Atom processors aren't supported by OSX, etc.) So after the installation, I ran netbook installer, restarted, downloaded Apple updates, restarted, ran netbook installer, restarted, downloaded Apple updates (though I ignored iLife update since I didn't install that), restarted, then it worked fine... if I boot from the usb drive and chose the internal hard drive.  It would also boot if I held shift (bringing up a boot menu) and typed "recovery=y" but anytime I tried a regular boot I got a kernel panic.  After this it was essentially running netbook installer, restart, and repeat until everything worked.  Now this is the point that I mentioned before.  Computer programs are supposed to be deterministic.  If I run a program, then run it again, it should do the same things to the same data, and thus have the same outcome.  Why I could run netbook installer, have it not work, run it again, have it not work, then run it again and everything is perfect makes no sense to me.  I can't really complain too much though as it DID eventually work. :-) So now I have a fancy little "Apple" netbook, and I love it so far!  I'm sure I will do a followup after the novelty wears off, but here's hoping it stays awesome. Thanks to the folks at MyDellMini for help in this process too.  From questions I asked to reading the answers to others, it really helped me through the process. Yay for hackintoshing!

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