One thing that I’ve learn already with only one day of ownership of my Dell Mini 9 is to be very frugal on what applications I’ve installed. I only got the 16 gig SSD option on the Mini 9, so I knew that I wouldn’t be putting large applications like Photoshop or MS Office on the machine. After the jump, I’ll go into what I’ve installed on my machine — and I’m surprised I got it all on there with room to spare.
As a recap from yesterday’s post, I installed OS X on the Mini 9 with a customized install. My custom installation did not install all the languages or the printer drivers. This save something like 3 gigs of diskspace. Which is a ton when you only have 16 gig, or rather 15 gigs usable. There are some articles out there that will allow you to minimize the installation even more. The articles I’ve seen involve manipulating some installation configuration files — a little too much work for my tastes. I’m not that desperate for disk space.
Okay… here’s the list of the absolutely essential software that I need on the device:
Open Office 3.1 (as opposed to MS Office. Free is for me anyway — I’m out of licenses for the MS Suite anyway.)
Firefox – with XMarks, CS Lite, Ad Blocker, and Google Gears. That last one is for offline Google Docs access.
Ecto – my favorite blogging software on the Mac.
Spanning Sync – to keep iCal updated with my family and personal calendar on Google
TextMate – Have you used it? You know why I have it installed.
QuickSilver – favorite application/productivity application
Adium – favorite chat application
Skype – video and voice chatting
Little Snitch – because I’m just that paranoid.
SoundSource – from Rogue Amoeba that allows me to change the audio inputs/outputs
DellEFI – the custom configuration software for a Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh
Other items that I’ve done to my setup:
Enabled Spaces – 4 desktops. With only 9 inches of screen space, more is better.
Move the Dock – I moved the Dock from the bottom to be on the left side of the screen and made it really small.
JPG to PNG – Ran a tool to convert my screen captures from JPG to be PNG.
So with all that installed, I now have something in the area of 5.8 gigs left on the internal SSD drive. I’ve reformatted the 8 gig USB stick I used in the installation process and I plan on using that for all my data that I don’t plan on keeping in the cloud.
I’m thinking of adding a few more applications – NetNewsWire and some Twitter client to be named at a later date. What else should I add?
-JT