Last week we wrote that some people thought of Snow Leopard as a disappointing upgrade because there wasn’t a new GUI included in it, specifically the ‘marble’ interface that has been speculated to exist for a while now. Those of us that have installed iTunes 9 may have noticed that the new iTunes application features a refined, shinier, and more modern looking GUI coating. Is this a sign of things to come for Mac OS X? I think it looks pretty sharp, so I certainly hope so. Until Apple releases a GUI update, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before a third party creates an app to spread the new iTunes 9 interface across the Mac OS X Finder, much like the Uno app did prior to 10.5. What do you think?

So you want a small lightweight portable Mac OS X machine, the closest thing Apple has in this area is the MacBook Air which is $1600 or more. No doubt about it, the MacBook Air is a great machine but I don’t want to spend anywhere near $1600 for another laptop when I already have a MacBook Pro. I’m thinking a small budget, like really small by Mac standards, how about $250 or less? Impossible you say? Wrong! It’s possible and I did it! Here’s how you can too. Be warned, this is not sanctioned by Apple, and it’s breaking the Mac OS X EULA agreement.

What You Will Need

* $200-$250, expenses vary based on your particular model, coupon code, and luck at the Dell Outlet
* 8gb USB key or external USB hard drive you don’t mind formatting
* Mac OS X 10.5 install DVD or image
* some patience

Finding a Cheap Dell Mini 10v for Hackintosh Purposes

So now you need to find the cheap Dell Mini 10v, the refurbs from Dell Outlet serve this purpose wonderfully. Combined with a discount code from the DellOutlet Twitter, and you have yourself a very affordable Hackintosh. My final price was $204 shipped!

Twitter: DellOutlet – follow DellOutlet on Twitter to get product discount codes, I got one for 15% off from here. They pop up once a week or so and have a limited duration.

Dell.com/Outlet – Mini 10v – check stock and sort by price, it’s a live search so you can constantly refresh it and see different stock from other people dumping their carts. I have seen a Mini 10v for as low as $219 BEFORE using the 15% coupon!

Hackintosh: Installing Mac OS X on the Dell Mini 10v

Gizmodo Guide to install Snow Leopard on the Dell Mini 10v – this is based on the information from MyDellMini forums but it’s made a bit easier to follow and has some nice pictures of progress. If you want to install Snow Leopard on your Mini 10v, this is a great guide to follow.

MyDellMini: Fool Proof No Hassle Mini 10v Install Guide – Fellow OS X Daily author Bill Ellis wrote about theHackintosh Dell Mini 10v several weeks ago, which is what first perked my interest in the topic. I followed the guide he suggested, it works, just follow the steps carefully and it will work for you too.

Upgrades, Troubleshooting, and more

MyDellMini – Install 2GB RAM Upgrade on Dell 10v – I followed the videos here to upgrade the memory. Ok I admit, the RAM upgrade was a total pain, but OS X smokes with 2gb of ram on the Mini 10v so if you’re technically competent and have the patience, it’s the best $19 you’ll have spent in a while. For what it’s worth, OS X runs just fine with only 1GB of RAM but you will see a noticeable speed bump with the 2GB upgrade.

MyDellMini Forums – this is a wildly helpful bunch of people that are quick to help and extremely knowledgeable on the topic, if you have any questions or run into problems at all, this is probably the best place to go.

MyDellMini Forums: Snow Leopard – Now that Snow Leopard is out I’d love to get it running on my little Hackintosh, but I’m going to wait until the process is a bit more streamlined before attempting this. If you follow the MyDellMini forums though, you’ll see many people have successfully installed it already, it’s just a bit complicated. I imagine the Hackintosh community will sort this out pretty soon, it’s a smart group.

Final Thoughts on Hackintosh

Considering how vibrant the Hackintosh community is, particularly focused on Netbooks, I think it points to a hole in Apple’s current product line: a cheap, lightweight, super-portable Mac. Until Apple fills this niche with something (the rumored Mac Tablet, or whatever), I’ll bet the Hackintosh community continues to grow, especially when people are pinching pennies in a recessionary economy. Hopefully Apple steps up and delivers, an Official Mac Netbook or equivalent would be awesome and I would buy one!

Apple certainly means well with the Software Updates, but sometimes I get update notifications I just don’t care about, or just don’t want to install. You can stop Software Update from pestering you about these particular packages by selecting the package in the Software Update screen, then navigating to the ‘Update’ menu and selecting “Ignore Update” (see screenshot below). If you accidentally ignore a package you do want, or you change your mind later, no problem – simply go to the Software Updates main menu and select “Reset Ignored Updates”

Snow Leopard 10.6 is the first Mac OS X version to ship with a 64 bit kernel, and obviously your Mac has to have a 64 bit processor to utilize that kernel, but some 64 bit Mac’s are not defaulting to the 64 bit kernel. So how do you know which kernel version your machine is using? The command to determine if you are using a 32 bit kernel or a 64 bit kernel is the same, it’s the output that will tell you which kernel version you are using.

Open the Terminal and type the following command:

uname -a

If you’re using a 32 bit Kernel in Mac OS X:
iMac:~ user$ uname -a
Darwin iMac.local 10.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0: Fri Jul 31 22:47:34 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1456.1.25~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

see the i386 on the end there? That indicates it’s the 32 bit kernel

If you’re using a 64 bit Kernel in Mac OS X:
iMac:~ user$ uname -a
Darwin iMac.local 10.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0: Fri Jul 31 22:47:34 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1456.1.25~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

the x86_64 at the end will let you know you are using the 64 bit kernel.

You can alternate between the two by holding down “6″ and “4″ during system boot to load the 64 bit kernel, or holding down ’3′ and ’2′ during boot to use the 32 bit kernel. Your machine should default into the kernel that is best supported.

If you haven’t installed Snow Leopard yet but you want to share in the nice eye candy, try downloading some full resolution background pics! You can click on the thumbnail to the left to download the full version of the default Snow Leopard background, and you can get the rest at Uneasy Silence. The desktop background pictures included in 10.6 Snow Leopard are beautiful and diverse, if you haven’t seen them yet, be sure to check them out and download them all.

UneasySilence: Full Resolution 10.6 Backgrounds

TechCrunch has an interesting op-ed piece today about why Snow Leopard is seen as disappointing to some casual Mac users who upgrade. The readers digest version? It doesn’t look or feel different enough. TechCrunch author MG Siegler basically argues that to the average user, changes in the look and feel of an operating system are what users notice most. Snow Leopard looks the same as Leopard, therefore in the eyes of most users, it is the same.

“…it’s fairly hard to tell that you’re actually using something that is any different from the previous version. Yes, there are many little, subtle changes all over, but aside from maybe Quicktime X, there is nothing that immediately strikes you as being different. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a little disappointing to me.”

Interesting argument, and I partially agree, but for me Snow Leopard has brought vast speed improvements to the Mac OS X Finder, iTunes, Preview, and Safari, which make the upgrade more than worth it. Like MG Siegler, I was a little disappointed to not get the rumored ‘marble’ GUI change that has been long discussed, but Snow Leopard won me over anyway with the functionality improvements. I know that TechCrunch isn’t an outlier in thinking this way though, a friend of mine who recently installed Windows 7 told me that although he still prefers Mac OS X, Windows 7 just looks more modern and fancy with all it’s transparency, gradients, and 3d effects.

What do you think? Are you disappointed that Snow Leopard doesn’t look and feel different enough?

The Hackintosh community just keeps on growing, and this particular guide is sure to roil some feathers. Lifehacker has an excellent walkthrough from start to finish on how to build a screaming desktop Mac Hackintosh that runs Snow Leopard, for under $900! Assuming you order the same parts, the incredible specs of the machine you end up with are as follows:

* 8GB of RAM
* 3.1 GHz
* 8GB of RAM
* 1TB Hard Disk
* GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512mb Graphics Card
* DVD Burner
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

LifeHacker sums up the specs of this build versus something comparable at the Apple Store as follows: “In short, my $900 “Hack Pro” sports better hardware than any Mac that Apple sells short of the $3,300 8-Core Mac Pro” – Wow! Now obviously building this machine takes some tech savviness, but if you want a powerful Mac and don’t have $3000 to spend, the Hackintosh build is a very compelling weekend project.

I actually have my own Hackintosh but it’s a Netbook and I simply love it. Several of my techy friends also have Hackintosh’s that are both Netbooks and Desktops and they are enthralled with the machines as well – the primary reason for creating a Hackintosh for them? Cost savings. The interesting thing is we are all ‘real’ Mac owners as well, but instead of buying a brand new machine we each opted to go the Hackintosh route.

Check out the Lifehacker article for the walkthrough of building a desktop Mac, or follow some of our other Hackintosh links:

LifeHacker: How to Build a Desktop Hackintosh With Snow Leopard for $900 from Start to Finish

Creating a Hackintosh Netbook: Install OS X on a Dell Mini 9, MSI Wind, Lenovo s10, and more

Install Mac OS X on a Dell Mini 10v

(above Hackintosh logo borrowed from KossNoCorp@DeviantArt)

QuickTime X is really cool and one of the many great improvements in Snow Leopard, but I was really surprised to find out that QuickTime X no longer automatically plays movie files on open, you’d think since I just opened the file I’d want to watch the movie! Thankfully resolving this is just a matter of entering a command in the Terminal. While digging around to figure this out I also uncovered some more QuickTime X hacks, like forcing QuickTime to stay full-screen even when it’s in the background, or how to force the titlebar to always show or always hide.

Each one of these commands can be reversed by changing the value from 1 to 0 or vice versa

Autoplay QuickTime Movies on Open:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

Automatically show subtitles and closed captioning:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGEnableCCAndSubtitlesOnOpen 1

Never show titlebar:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoTitlebar 1

Always show title bar & controller:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGUIVisibilityNeverAutohide 1

Disable rounded corners in QuickTime X Player:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 1

Keep playing movies full screen even when you leave QuickTime as inactive window:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGFullScreenExitOnAppSwitch 0

Cult of Mac posted a pretty compelling picture of a new full screen keyboard feature in Snow Leopard that certainly looks like it’d be handy if you had a touchscreen Mac. With all the rumors of the Tablet Mac floating around, this just may be some evidence that the upcoming Mac Tablet will be running Snow Leopard rather than some version of the iPod Touch / iPhone OS. Here’s how you can see the screen keyboard yourself, courtesy of Cult of Mac:

* Go to System Preferences>Keyboard
* Click the box “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar”
* Go to the menu bar at top right and click “Show Keyboard Viewer”

Very interesting. What do you think?

via: Cult of Mac:

If you have a Mac without a functioning DVD drive (or a MacBook Air), you’ll need to find another way to upgrade to Snow Leopard, thankfully this is very easy, all you’ll need is an external firewire or USB hard drive. OK so the title might be slightly misleading, you’ll need access to a DVD drive *somewhere* so that you can make a disk image of the Snow Leopard install disk with the Disk Utility tool, but once you have the disc image you won’t need the DVD drive again. What you WILL need the entire time though is an external Firewire or USB drive that you don’t mind formatting, so that you can make the device bootable and upgrade to Snow Leopard from it.

As some readers pointed out, this step isn’t required. If you do need to, you can create a DMG file of the Snow Leopard disk, this is very easy.
* Launch Disk Utility
* Select the Snow Leopard DVD within Disk Utility
* Click the “New Image” button at the top
* Name the image and put it somewhere you can find it easily (Desktop)
* Click OK and wait for the image to be created

Easy enough right? Ok so here’s how you create a bootable Snow Leopard installation drive out of your external firewire or USB hard disk.

Install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from an external Firewire or USB drive

* Launch Disk Utility
* Select the External Firewire/USB device that you want to use as the boot drive for the upgrade
* Click “Partition” from the menu options
* Select 1 Partition, then click “Options” below the partition scheme
* Select the top option for “GUID Partition Table” – it MUST be GUID to be bootable!
* Click OK to create the GUID partition (this will reformat the drive, ie: all data is lost)
* Next, click the “Restore” tab within Disk Utility
* Select your newly made Snow Leopard 10.6 Install DVD image and restore this image to the GUID partition you just created OR…
* Alternatively, you can select the Snow Leopard Install DVD and restore directly from the DVD to the GUID partition
* After the restoration is complete, your GUID partition will now be bootable by Mac OS X!
* Reboot the Mac holding down the “Option” key to pull up the boot loader, select the Snow Leopard install drive you just created rather than your default Mac OS hard drive
* Install Snow Leopard as usual!