Comments on: Hackit: Are you running OSX on your netbook?

By: J

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:41:12 +0000

Sad, there doesn’t seem to be any development for the new generation of netbooks and OSX. I found this site http://osxnetbooks.blogspot.com/ but it’s too new.
I am looking for a tutorial to instal OSX on an Asus X101.

By: modifiedmind

modifiedmind — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:58:52 +0000

am currently running 10.5.2 on my dell e1705 and loving it. it was quite a journey getting everything working, id guess i spent a good 2 weeks trying things and installing over and over. i finally got everything except my wireless card working so i broke down and ordered a broadcom card that i knew had native drivers… now i am happy to say i am running only osx and it runs perfect.

By: 5318008

5318008 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:20:08 +0000

I dual boot my Aspire One 150 into OSx86 and XP home. I have it default boot into Apple’s OS, for all my browsing and messaging and video and audio processing and some card games, and if I hit one key during boot I go to XP instead for my World of Goo and my Counter-Strike and my console emulators. Cheers! I also put the SkinGirl “Starry Night” decal set on my (white) 150, and snuck a sparkly gold Apple logo over the moon in the photo. Bonus points. The install wasn’t so bad after a few tries and days of forum crawling. It mostly worked out of the box, just needed a couple tweaks, and of course swapped out WiFi cards. Everything works great currently whee. The dual-boot management was the only super-pain.

By: Apparissus

Apparissus — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:37:21 +0000

@Alvaro: If you get the most recent DellEFI package (assuming you used the DellEFI install method, which it sounds like you did) and update with it, the stuck-”0″-key-on-wake is fixed, along with the annoying bug where the SD card driver will crash if you forget to eject your card before removing it.

By: Apparissus

Apparissus — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:33:34 +0000

I’ve been running OS X on my Mini 9 for months and loving it. In the last few weeks the compatability has become essentially perfect, and though the SSD upgrade is pretty much a requirement, the HUGE performance gain from the faster write speeds (4x – 5x better than the OEM drive) make the upgrade more than worth it even for Windows or Linux users.

~$250 bare bones Mini 9
~ $65 runcore 16GB SSD
~ $20 2GB RAM
———–
Less than $350 for a virtually native Mac OS experience.

By: tmbinc

tmbinc — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:19:50 +0000

FORGET GEEKBENCH. yes.

Especially read about how PPC vs. Intel scores are calculated – they cannot be compared. Forget Geekbench for not allowing re-compilation (this, for example, kills all in-order PPC (Cell, Xenon) results). Forget Geekbench for being just buggy at some places. Forget Geekbench for having obscure benchmark methods, which are even less reliable than purely synthetic benchmarks.

Forget geekbench. Use a proper benchmark. A benchmark is more than just timing the runtime of a function.

By: EpsilonSun

EpsilonSun — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 06:10:51 +0000

I got an eee pc 1000ha for christmas and immediately installed leopard on it (after a ram upgrade). It’s been great so far. No major problems. My only complaints are small ones. The sound has to be manually switched between internal speakers and headphones. The mic and line-in don’t work (usb mics work). I can’t upgrade leopard past 10.5.5 yet (i dont think). Other than that I’m really happy with my “Mac Book Nano.”

By: joe57005

joe57005 — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:56:07 +0000

linux ftw!

By: Hack5190

Hack5190 — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:37:56 +0000

I run OS X (10.5.5) on my Dell Inspiron 1520 with very good performance.

To me OS X is nothing more than BSD w/X windows and a few add-on’s from Apple.

Don’t fear the fruit, run OS X on your PC ;)

By: mrasmus

mrasmus — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:34:49 +0000

It’s true that the Wind’s install process isn’t as clean at the moment as the Dell’s, but there’s a couple different methods of going through it discussed over @ msiwind.net’s forums. You’re not, however, limited to the install DVD’s version — the latest release was Leopard .4, but using software update and then re-installing some kext’s (some people need an external keyboard for this, I didn’t) make everything work in the latest version. I used my friend’s resources (borrowed his DVD+drive), so I was actually using an older hack then updating to the latest. The community for the Wind is great though, and there’s guides for various ways of going about the install. They talk about with an external DVD drive and a retail DVD, with a drive and a pre-hacked DVD, with a USB drive… even a method for installing with no USB media at all (I don’t know the details, I’d assume they’re doing a netboot or a partition built to do the install). There’s options, documentation, and a healthy community of supporters for people who have questions/problems. Having only used the Dell in passing, I can’t really give a good verdict on which is better, but I’m pretty happy with my Wind.

By: jiggy-wiggy-piggy

jiggy-wiggy-piggy — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:07:07 +0000

then im getting a mini-9 thnx for the info that seals the deal for me DSLinux-OSX86 dualboot here i come

By: jon

jon — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:25:22 +0000

Alvaro, I have had the same experience as you with the Dell Mini 9. It’s hardly worth calling it a hack, running OS X on it, as the folks behind this have made it so easy for the end user to do it. I don’t think there is any other netbook out there that works as well with as much ease for an install. It really does ‘just work’, even when installing it from a USB drive. And the best part is that it doesn’t take a hacked distribution of OSx86, you just use a retail disk and install it after booting off the 132 disk.

By: blah

blah — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:35:05 +0000

Does that graph seriously say “integrer”?

By: Alvaro

Alvaro — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:07:39 +0000

Actually from what I’ve been hearing the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is far better than the MSI Wind. The Wind still has some issues, and requires a fairly patched together installer DVD. Because of the way it’s set up, you’re also stuck on whatever version of OSX that DVD is.
The Mini 9 can be installed using an original OSX installer and a (free) boot CD available online. I’m not an expert, though I am running OSX on mine, but I believe it emulates EFI that OSX needs to run and loads up the nonstandard drivers necessary from a directory on the hard drive. This means that you can comfortably autoupdate the OS without it crashing. Every feature on the netbook works, including the camera and wireless (no special software requires) and even sleep. I didn’t even need a USB DVD drive to do it, I was able to image the media required to USB drives (though I had to borrow a friend’s Mac for the Leopard one.)
The only caveats are that sometimes 0 acts like it’s stuck down after you resume from sleep–just hit Esc to fix that–and the card reader just supports SD/SDHC.
For reference:
http://mydellmini.com/forum/howto-install-os-x-the-right-way-type11-boot132–t1106.html

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:17:45 +0000

I have a MSI Wind runnning Lepoard and with a 9 cell aftermarket battery it runs for 5+ hours. I use it for Trips and light gaming.