OSX on EeePC 900

Categories: 900, Featured, OS, OSX
Written By: Pistooli

Well, it is possible. Almost a fully functioning little machine running OSX.

…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. :)

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