Marcel Nijman

Hackintosh

Running OS X on an Asus Eee PC 900

The Asus Eee PC is a series of handy netbooks. Unfortunately, mine came with the terrible Xandros. I connected to the internet, ran system update, and Xandros took care of the rest (= removed itself *completely*). Then, I ran Ubuntu for half a year. Pretty happy with it, except for the fact that the wireless is quickly lost, and then only a reboot helps.

But, being a Mac fan, I had to try to get OS X running on it. Here's my experience.

What you need:

  • Asus Eee PC 900
  • external DVD drive
  • Mac OS X 10.4.8 [JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2].iso
  • empty DVD
  • paperclip or staple

I have BIOS 0906 installed, but everything should also work with the original BIOS.

I tried several distributions before setteling for JaS. The Uphuck distro installs, but freezes during boot. The Leopard distros don't even get past the language selection screen. Some people have gotten these distros to work on a member of the Eee PC family (701 or 1000), but nowhere did I read about success on the 900. In my experience, JaS is the only distro to run on the 900.

Legal issues

Don't forget to buy an original copy of OS X, and to put an Apple sticker somewhere on the Eee PC.

Hardware mod

For some reason OS X needs to be fooled into recognizing an external monitor. You can do this by making a connection between two pins of the VGA port, either with a paperclip or, in my case, with a staple. Without this, installation works fine, but after booting you will just see a blue screen.

Installation

Burn the ISO to a DVD, then boot the DVD. Start the Disk Utility application, and format the 4GB SSD with MAC OS Extended. Don't use a journaled file system, because the extra writes wear out your SD card.

You might be tempted to install OS X on the 16 GB SSD, but this card is slower, and I'm not sure whether OS X can even boot from it.

After partitioning and formating, quit Disk Utility and proceed with the installation. To save space, don't instal the printer drivers and the language translations. You probably don't need all the extra stuff either, but just select it to be on the safe side. :-) All I did was turn off the GMA 950 VGA driver, since this laptop has GMA 900.

Result

Boot time is about 50 seconds.

Hardware:

  • No AirPort. To get this working you need a Dell 1390 Mini PCI Express WiFi Card.
  • USB 2.0 works
  • No Ethernet
  • No Audio
  • No Bluetooth
  • Camera works

System:

  • I turned off most of the eye candy, like the Genie effect, and the bouncing icons in the Dock.
  • Animation is disabled. You can see this by running Grapher (from Applications/Utilities) and selecting 3D Graph. Also, the screen saver runs only in test mode.
  • The sleep button is working, but does not resume. Workaround: do a shut down. This is, of course, very annoying, since a working sleep function is essential for everyday use.
  • clock runs slow
  • 2 slow clicks lead to double click. So, I only manage to rename a file by using the terminal!
  • battery indicator behaves strange (slow update and letters disappear)

Software:

  • Adobe Reader 8.1.2: very fast
  • VLC: *very* slow (1 fps)
  • DarwinPorts 1.5.0
    After installation do: 
    $ sudo ditto /opt /Volumes/SSD/opt
$ sudo rm -rf /opt
$ sudo ln -s /Volumes/SSD/opt /opt

I use the 16 SSD for user installed applications. Don't put your home directory there: Tiger wants it to be on the boot disk.

Conclusion

The speed of most application is acceptable. But you will probably not get a lot of productivity out of your netbook. With the LAN not working, you'll need the Dell WiFi card to get access to the internet. Even then, the lack of audio and video greatly reduces the use of your computer. And without the sleep functionallity you'll have to boot every time.

This compares very poor to XP running on the same machine. Thanks to the drivers everything works smoothly: audio, full screen video, camera, ethernet, wireless lan, sleep functionallity, special buttons. Especially the full screen video is in big contrast to the performance of OS X. We'll just have to wait for better drivers for OS X...

All in all, running OS X on the 900 is only advisable for real Mac fans.

© 2009 Marcel Nijman