…and since I have a family license (5 pcs) for Leopard I decided to try. In my opinion the so called retail install is a much more elegant way of installing OSX on not Apple computer (still the legality is questionable), but the EeePC 900 has a Celeron processor and retail install disk just simple does not work.

The most important thing to note is that the wifi card in the 900 is less then supported, so it is a good idea to swap it for a real Apple Airport wifi card.

Other than that the machine works fine (also the os needs to be installed onto the secondary 16 GB SSD, because the primary is only 4 GB), unfortunately the 16 GB SSD is way slower that the 4 GB. It is really a good idea to upgrade it to a bigger and foremost faster SSD (RunCore seems to be a good choice).

The installation:

1. Grab the iDeneb installation disk (it is available thorough the net, but if you decide to keep the installation, please go to Apple and buy a Leopard install disk), I tried the iDeneb v1.4, 10.5.6

2. Install OSX onto a removable media (external HD) booting in a real Mac or as I did in EeePC 901 (which has a supported Atom processor)

3. Select the following on the installation screen:

- Under kernel, select Voodoo kernel (suitable for EeePC 900)

- Under video, select GMA900 (again for the 900)

- Under chipset, select ICHx Fixed

- Under FIX, select ACPI_SMC_FIX, Seatbelt FIX, Battery Manager, PowerOFF_OH

- Under System Utilities, select GenericCPUPowerManagementControl

- Under applications, select Betterzip, Kexthelper, Menumeters, OSx86 Tools, Pacifist.

5. Install iDeneb (just to emphasize, installation is done on a supported computer, not on the EeePC 900 itself, and the install media is an external drive, e.g., external hard disk)

Note that I did not install neither sound, nor ethernet drivers during install)

6. After the installation it is time to plug in the freshly installed external HD into the EeePC and boot from it.

7. Meanwhile on a different computer download the needed kext files for sound and ethernet and two addition softwares for transferring (Carbon Copy) the iDeneb onto the 2nd SSD of the EeePC and making it bootable.

8. Once the iDeneb booted, start Carbon Copy and “clone” the image from the external disk onto the 16 GB second SSD of the EeePC. Take a walk, go to a good caffe, read a book, this take almost an hour.

9. Start the Uinstaller (select PC_EFI v9 Chameleon as option, nothing else), this will make the freshly imaged install on your EeePC bootable.

10. Reboot the EeePC and hope that it will boot from the 16 GB SSD. It should.

11. Start KextHelper application and install the kext for sound and ethernet. Reboot.

12. Enjoy!

Few remarks:

- I did not play with the original Atheros wifi card (some says it kinda works), you should really swap it to an Apple Airport Card.

- Webcam does not seem to be working (but I admit, I don’t pay attention to this at all).

Finally the credit goes to some nice people, who wrote installation instructions:

Siewwaihung

DanB

And a final note:

You will realize the performance is not the best (due to the slow SSD). While it is a nice experiment, I would not recommend it to use this installation for daily work. Especially because the legality of the installation is questionable even if you have a proper Leopard license, as I do. Try it, play with it, then delete it and install a decent Linux distro on the EeePC.

Until I actually write a longer post about Haiku running on the EeePC 900, here are some screenshots:

Battery Applet:

Battery info:

And of course I posted from Haiku, sitting in the garden, connected with wifi and carefully watching the battery applet showing still 20% left.

According to the source of information, the iso could be downloaded from here. Look for EeePC_1.7-2009-01-20_09-52.iso

I decided to try it on the EeePC 900, which I barely use anymore. Created an installable usb image from the iso with unetbootin, and installed the 1.7 beta.

Interestingly enough it seems to support a wast amount of different EeePC versions (from 700 upto S101, including my 900 as well).

First I tried the uncompressed installation but it did not boot, so I went for the compressed image (which is a but slower according to the install information)

And it works…

The default “skin” of the 1.7 build is nice:

And the very nice thing is that finally it has Firefox 3… (ok, still only 3.04)

So far it seems to be stable fro browsing via wifi connection. Worth to try.

Also, upgrading Firefox to the latest 3.5.2 was much easier than before. just downloaded Linux binary and extracted into the XandrOS firefox install directory under /opt (carefully without the plugin directory which was actually a link).

Final note on tweaking, the keyboard: since I use a localized hungarian keyboard, the xorg.conf file needs to be modified. simple.
Edit: the tweaking was unnecessary… The is a nice GUI to add/remove additional keyboard languages:

One small annoyance, as I wanted to set some settings for the touchpad, as soon as I hit the Touchpad icon under settings, the mouse cursor stopped responding. After some trial and error, I found out that one line needs to be changed in xorg.conf in order to function (in InputDevice section for synaptic)
     Option   “SHMConfig”  “false”
originally it was value “true”
The Touchpad utility does not work, but the mouse (including side scrolling) does.

since ubuntu is a nice and uptodate Linux distro, it was worth to try… and ubuntueee installed flawless on the EeePC 900.

a more in-depth installation instruction will follow, however the main reason for the little challenge was to see how KDevelop runs on the EeePC 900.

well… I need to test ubuntueee and Kdevelop, but it might even turn out that I will keep ubuntueee as the primary (or only) OS on the 900.

it was an easy task to replace, straightforward, 3 minutes job.

after the physical replacement, the remaining issue was to reconfigure the X windows manager (sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

“us” needs to be changed to “hu”

save the file and quit vim

the windows manager needs to be restarted (either Ctrl Alt Backspace or reboot the EeePC if you like)

and voilá… the famous Hungarian sentence, which contains all accented characters:

thats it!

lets start with this picture:

is it a good enough explanation? since I bought my 900 from Taiwan, it obviously came with Chinese restore DVD… of course the default system language could be changed as described in the wiki, but it is highly unpractical.

and getting a localized restore DVD (from asusparts.eu costs around 10 EUR and 3 weeks to deliver - this later one is the real pain actually)

before we start it is highly advise to backup the content of the /home/user directory and copy to a usb drive the following files and directories (we need them later)
- /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/net/
- /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/atheros
(these are the drives modules for the ethernet and the wifi)

so, lets put the 901 restore DVD into a usb DVD drive, connected to the EeePC 900 and wipe out the original system…

the restore itself is self-explanatory and after some 5 mins, the little EeePC boots into the freshly installed OS v1.6.1

much better…

of course the About page is as nice as it could be…

software version 1.6.1.36 build date 22/07/2008… nice…

OK. back to work… there is still much tweak to do in order to get a fully working system…

what does not work:
- wifi (founds wifi signal, but does not connect)
- wired ethernet
- sound
- usb camera

obviously, I would say, because the 900 hardware is somewhat different, than the 901, and the OS 1.6.1 is so much optimized (kernel is custom made), so it lacks any other driver modules, then the ones actually built in the machine.

lets grab the modules for the above mentioned hardware components and put them on the freshly installed EeeC.

lets copy the directories /net and /atheros into /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/ and execute command sudo depmod

also the /etc/modules file needs to be modified, so the proper modules (900 hw specific ones) will be loaded.

the changes are:

#atl1
#rtl2860sta

ath_pci
atl2
uvcvideo
snd-hda-intel

lets reboot the little 900 with a facelift…

now there is only one item to be fixed… the wifi driver, which coulld be downloaded from here…

lets unpack the files with unrar x wireless.rar
install the driver sudo dpkg -i xandros-wpa-supplicant_0.5.7.x.3.1-1_i386.deb

the other files don’t need to be installed, the wifi will work without them.

easy? well… not too difficult… the EeePC 900 now boots fine into OS 1.6.1 and many new features are available, for me the most important is better 3G support (namely for the Option Icon225 usb).

two remaining issues so far:
- function keys for sound don’t work
- the little icon for wifi status does not work (wifi itself does)

enjoy OS 1.6.1 on the EeePC 900!

There are MAJOR enhancements in v1.6.1 (most important for me perhaps, that it has native support for the Option Icon225 mobile broadband usb card), so I just had to test this release. But how? It is designed to run on EeePC 901, and not on any other hardware versions (e.g., 701 or 900).

Well… It took almost two days, but it runs now on my 900 machine almost perfectly…

There are bits and pieces needs to be ironed out, but here is a list of the working features:

- graphics (perfect)
- sound (tweaked, works)
- wifi (tweaked, works)
- ethernet (tweaked, works, need to start manually)
- usb (perfect)
- webcam (tweaked, works)
- battery information, acpi (perfect)
- cpu throttling (perfect)
- sleep (works, minor problem still persist, not effecting functionality)
- new feature, auto power saving (perfect)
- function keys, OSD (tweaked, works)
- performance (better than v1.3)

Whats left? The only thing still to be done is the wifi, where I installed the correct drivers, it appears to be working, but it does not get IP address from the router, so still needs to be investigated.

But again, the very best feature for me is that icon225 works like a charm… after inserting the usb modem, a nice (and simple enough) gui pops up and ready to make hsdpa connection. Nice…

All in all, after solving the wifi problem it will be an upgrade (hack really) to keep on the machine…

I wonder if the “pending wifi” problem could be solved with the following found at the eeeuser.com? Need to test it soon.

UPDATE (11.09.2008): and YES!!! Wifi also works according to the instructions above in the link…

More detailed info about the upgrading process will come soon…

ps. I love the new 7800 battery…
ps2. ScribeFire rocks…