Nothing's Perfect

In a perfect world, I would be able to restore the Snow Leopard Retail DVD onto an external HDD or USB, apply NetbookBootMaker on it and use it to install Snow Leopard directly onto the HP Mini 1000; my MacBook Mini. It wouldn't stall at "Remaining time : 7 minutes" and it wouldn't give me this bugger of a line when I check the Install Log:

"OSInstaller [154] : /postinstall : cp : /Volumes/ramdisk/dsdt/latest_dsdl.dsl : No such file or directory"

In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to use my hackintosh MSI Wind on which I had to run the installer to get a "prototype" bootable Snow Leopard running on another partition in my external HDD. This prototype then I would boot the HP Mini with and once inside Snow Leo prototype installation, I would run OSInstall.mpkg to install to the HP Mini's internal hard drive. In a perfect world, my Snow Leopardized MacBook Mini would sleep and resume like a decent hackintosh.

In a perfect world, internal hard drives in Snow Leopard wouldn't display as removable drives as represented by the yellow drive icon.

In a perfect world, Quartz Extreme would be enabled and the internal mic would work with the new VoodooHDA kext and PrefPane; I won't have to drill in SysPref > Sound > Ouput > PCM and so on and so forth just to be able to really adjust the volume.

In a perfect world, I would've had the sense to keep my girly-frou-frou and geeky-hackintosher personas separate so I wouldn't have thought of blow drying my hair in attempts to imitate my current favorite Taiwanese idol drama lead actress while I wait for the point update to finish installing on MacBook Mini. Now I'm waiting for my replacement keyboard cause the O.C. in me cannot stand wilted keycaps though it's still a perfectly functional keyboard.

But in this imperfect world, MacBook Mini is, indeed running on Snow Leopard. It updated to 10.6.1 smoothly - without the usual pains of normal point updates before since I'm running EFI boot 132 and my kexts in the /Extra folder remain intact and are happily loaded each and every time I boot up my system.

The fan is working and so are the bluetooth, WiFi, Marvell Yukon 2 ethernet supported as native. The webcam, though still far from giving a stellar experience, works (albeit sluggishly and with graininess that's anything but subtle) when PhotoBooth is launched. Sliding switch for toggling BT and WiFi on or off is working like it should and I could control brightness with fn+f3/f4 sans aucun problème !

Snow Leopard is zippier indeed - not by a significant much over 10.5 Leopard but it is snappier feeling all in all. And I'm adoring the new Finder and Quick Time X. MacBook Mini even shuts down and restarts dandy with OpenHaltRestart - I had an issue previously with Leopard wherein I had to make sure I switch the BT/WiFi back on so the light turns blue before I restart, else the HP Mini would just sit there like a block of cheese, frozen in perpetuity until I force it to power off.

No more blank page in System Profiler > Hardware as every little about the HP Mini is now known by Mac OS X; it even thinks it's a MacBook Air! Though I'm quite stumped why its bios version is listed as "f.13f" when I remember I just updated my bios last month to F.14F. Hmmm. . .

The Apple logo and the spinning wheel (yes, that's right - the even the spinning wheel) in the boot splash screen are no longer squashed but are finally able to grace Mac OS X boot up with equally gorgeous proportions. So what am I ranting about? This makes me a persona non grata I guess ;)

LeMaurien19