Over at Wired Gadget Lab, they’re taking a look back at several people who’ve gone to a bunch of trouble to hack up and deal with the pitfalls of netbooks running OSX. As the story’s title states, it ain’t pretty. In a nutshell, they found that even if you load a nice OS onto a cheap, tiny computer, you still have to deal with the inherent downsides of a cheap, tiny computer, and when you run an Apple OS on a non-Apple machine, you’ll have some software problems. I read this article with great interest, because a few months ago I bought an MSI Wind (the same netbook that this guy used) with thoughts of putting OSX on it. But this article set me to thinking about netbooks, the mythical Apple netbook, and Apple’s Newton legacy.My netbook hackintosh story ended early, since the MSI Wind I bought arrived DOA, and MSI instructed me to return it to Amazon (I was surprised that they didn’t offer to send me a replacement, because after getting the chance to think about it, I decided I had better things to spend my $279 on, and didn’t order a replacement). I found the small form factor and the overall feel of the Wind to be quite appealing. I never got a chance to really use its notoriously small trackpad, though.
When I looked into what I would really need to make the install, I realized that I didn’t have an external USB DVD drive, so I was trying to figure out how to do it with a thumbdrive, and reading about the various drivers and problems that people were having with Wi-Fi and I just realized that this was going to become one of those notorious all night, or even multi-day hacking sessions that I get myself into far too frequently.
Here’s a summary of what you need for OSX on the MSI:
- MSI Wind Netbook
- External USB DVD drive
- Windows XP bootable CD
- MSIwindosx86 iso disk image (google it)
- The official OSX 10.5.4 delta upgrade here (Do not use the other combo package)
- Realtek wireless driver/utility (forum link/direct rapid share link)
- fixed intel 950 GFX drivers for correct 1024×600 resolution (Attached, extract the .pkg file and run it)
Last week I wasted two hours trying to figure out why my shredder wasn’t working. Every time I do that, I kick myself. But I can’t help it! Oh, but this time I could help it. I sent the Wind back, and I’ll spend my energies speculating on when Apple will release a proper netbook/tablet and stop with the sideshow about how the iPhone is their netbook.
To be honest, I’m pretty sure I would have stuck with Windows on the netbook. I’m not that big of a Mac zealot, though I have never used a non-Apple laptop for more than a couple of months. My side trips with Sonys and Dells have always ended in tears, and though I’m very happy with my $400 home-built Quad core Windows machine (with Vista, no less), I really like Apple notebooks. My usage of the iPhone would almost qualify me as the poster boy for the iPhone-as-netbook claim. I’m on the iPhone constantly, and not just reading email and the web. I’m on RSS, I compose long text passages for various projects, I connect to and participate in my company intranet, buy things online, do banking, instant message, post to Facebook, make VoIP calls, and all the other stuff that “there’s an app for.”
So why do I still want a real netbook? Probably for the stupidest reason of all: just because I think they’re cool and cute. I have this fantasy that when I travel I could leave my 15″ Macbook Pro behind and go lighter weight, but I bet that wouldn’t happen. I’d just bring them both. But probably the biggest reason is because there are times when I could use my iPhone for something, but the iPhone just doesn’t quite cut it. The website uses Flash, or I have a bit more typing to do that I’d want to do on the dinky keyboard, or I need to cut and paste, or to attach a document to an email, or, as is most likely, because my iPhone battery is dead because I’ve been using it all day.
If you’ve been reading OSNews since 1997, you’d know that I was a big fan of the Newton Messagepad 2000/2100. For over a decade, I’ve been waiting for Apple to revive the pocket-sized, but large, touchscreen, but with detached keyboard, net-enabled, powerful processor, stripped down, intuitive OS, tablet/PDA hybrid that was the MP2K. 
I don’t have any inside information about what’s percolating inside Apple, but I have a pretty strong feeling that the MP2K successor is on its way, and it’s Apple’s answer to the netbook. I can easily imagine a thin touchscreen tablet, like an iPod Touch about three times the size, running either the new iPhone OS or a simplified OSX (I’m thinking iPhone, but hoping for OSX) with a detached or detachable wireless keyboard, plenty of network options (3G/4G built in, of course). And it would cost $500-700. I mean, how could Apple come out with a Netbook that wasn’t twice as cool and twice as expensive as all the other netbooks, right?
So would I buy one of these? I’m not sure I would. It might be like the Macbook Air; something I was really excited about until I took a hard look at the specs and the price and realized that it wasn’t really for me. It might be that the empty space between my iPhone and my laptop couldn’t be dramatically narrowed by a slightly smaller laptop and some important software improvements to the iPhone.
Kind of like … if built a kit-car Ferrari Modena … and put a Ford Escort engine in it but added like five turbochargers … it wouldn’t be the same as the genuine article.
No. Really?
I use osx on my wind (advent4211)
Works a treat. In reality I could as happily use a linux distro, just a little less fun
I was quite surprised how well osx runs on a non optimized platform with limited memory.
It does show that apple could produce a mini mini with an ion chipset for graphics that would function as a wonderful media centre
I have a EeePC 901, with SSD and it rocks.
I wanted small and something that wouldn’t break easily to surf everywhere and read PDFs and websites.
It has been great so far .. maybe the ARM powered devices with touchscreens might be better in the future.
I don’t do a lot of typing on my EeePC, but the small size, the robustness and the multitouch touchpad really are great. (So is the added screen realastate provided by the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.)
on this article
The aricle doesn’t tell how the hack was done, so it doesn’t fall under DMCA.
The aricle doesn’t tell how the hack was done, so it doesn’t fall under DMCA.
Hasn’t stopped Apple before.
Pondered OS X on my Aspire One as well. Two reasons I decided not to bother.
I) No drivers for the wireless card. I’d need to replace it with another one.
II) Windows 7. Why would I go through all the trouble of hacking Mac OS X on my netbook, with all the associated DIY crap, when there’s Windows 7 which I like just as much as OS X?
Edited 2009-04-29 18:14 UTC
DIYing an OS onto unsupported hardware is half the fun 🙂
I learnt more hacking OSX onto an unsupported PC system then using my real mac sitting on my desk.
Why? Because my mac ‘just works’ my hackintosh works.. but im sure i can make it better.. maybe a little better… little more……. Broken 😀
I would never be able to do the same on my Mac as I couldn’t afford the downtime which would inevitably follow!
I have a Dell mini9 and really enjoy OSX on it. I think it’s like OS/2 in the regard that you have to do your research first, especially on hardware to have a good experience in hacking these things. I use the netbook so much that it has now become my main machine. I just sold my 17″ MBP and use this thing exclusively now. Sure, I can’t video edit and do Aperture stuff, but for what I’ve been doing, it works great.
When I get home, it plugs into my 20″ LCD and if I need to do a ton of typing, I use my Apple bluetooth keyboard. I have a nice tablet hooked in and all. Even put IR in mine for Keynote presentations.
I mean, really, by today’s standards the thing is underpowered, but it’s a 1.6 GHz processor with 2 GB RAM. I have a 16GB SSD, which works great, and if I need more storage, I have 3TB on my home network I can access. For a typical person’s use it’s a fine processor and such.
Yeah, I’m crazy using it for my main machine, but it works, has saved me money (sold my 17″ high-rez for good coin) and works for my research and web design stuff.
i’m running mac os on my dell xps410 (quad 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM) since tiger 10.4.7 and i love it. for me vista was no option and i like to play with photoshop sometimes which is a no go on Linux unless you want it to run under wine. as a real vista hater i must say Windows 7 is really great OS from MS after long time but Mac OS suits all my needs pretty well and if i really need something from windows world there’s vmware+xp
Edited 2009-04-29 18:25 UTC
Disclaimer: I own a netbook (acer aspire one), but I did not try to run OSX on it.
However, the article referred to is not about OSD: yeah the guy lost his wi-fi due to a faulty driver, but how could that be related to OSX only ???
His main complaint is about the hardware. Too bad for him: I’m subbing/biking/reading/whatevering with my aspire one in my back pack since I bought it 6 month ago, and no screw did ever loosen, even just a bit.
Now, when I have time to find the article referred two where two of his colleagues are complaining, there may be substance about real hackintosh problem.
This article is a waste of cyberspace.
Is this an Apple “Get the Facts” campaign? I believe that this is the kind of article that Apple wants distributed over the internet. “Buy a Genuine MAC” forget what you think you’d want!
I believe that the Hackintosh and hackbook projects are worthy and educational. For $279, of course you wouldn’t get the performance of the $1000+ laptops! That’s a given!
Though it wasn’t my intention to make that point, I can see what you’re saying. Make no mistake, I admire the hackers and the rabble-rousers who are making netbook hackintoshes, and I don’t think they should wait for table scraps from Apple. I just need to complete the four uncompleted hacking projects that I’m already working on before I take on a new one.
A friend and I did this with his MSI Wind. He wanted to go all the way and he did, replacing his wireless card and everything with a Dell 1390 MiniPCI card which has the same Broadcom (yuck) chipset as the Airport cards in modern Macbooks. He also upgraded the RAM to 2gb, which IMHO is a must for running OS X with any reasonable degree of speed. Leopard, in particular, can easily swap out with only 1gb of RAM. It did work, and it worked pretty well, but eventually the custom hacks you needed to do to keep it updated to the latest Leopard revisions got on his nerves, and mine too whenever I had to remotely fix it either by ssh or by phone. It was his Wind, but I knew more about OS X itself, so everytime something broke he’d end up asking for my help. I didn’t have a netbook at the time, and I have a real Mac so I didn’t bother making a hackintosh myself.
It’s one of those hacking projects that, if you’re a computer geek, you enjoy doing and can feel quite the sense of accomplishment after doing it. As long as you don’t have to keep up with the latest OS X revisions, it works fine at least on the MSI Wind with its wifi card swapped out. In the end though, something tends to crop up whether it’s a problem with updates, or for some reason your kexts stop being automatically loaded… it’s often more trouble than it’s worth in the long haul. Sometimes, it made some of the Linux upgrade issues I’ve had look like nothing by comparison. In general, once you get a hackintosh running… leave it alone or you’re likely to break it. OS X is fragile on non-Apple hardware, and there are some really crappy drivers out there.
When I got my Eee pc 1000HE, I didn’t bother with it even though it’s pretty well suited to be a hackintosh. I’m sick of Apple in any case, and didn’t want to deal with yet another unfinished hacking project, so I just stuck Ubuntu 9.04 on it.
Umm, excuse me? What do you think Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) is if not an unfinished hacking project? Ubuntu, being based on Debian is nothing more than a snapshot of Debian’s Unstable branch at a given point in time. Polished and finessed of course until good enough for daily use (debatable.) Nevertheless, still a work in progress.
Not the point, and I guess I shouldn’t’ve even brought up Ubuntu, since it’s going to throw the conversation back into another Linux vs OS X vs whatever flamewar. Appologies in advance before the flamewar sparks…
What I meant was that I do not want to be constantly hacking/fixing my system. Any os, be it Windows or Linux or OS X, needs some regular maintenance and upkeep. But I don’t feel like dealing with tempramental kexts on a daily basis, being concerned that the latest hacked update will break something or cause unforseen issues with another driver, etc. All oses have issues, but at the moment I find dealing with Linux much less of a headache than dealing with hacked OS X installations after a few months. Your milage and experience may vary, of course, but my findings are that a hackintosh is more effort than it’s ultimately worth, particularly on a netbook. On a desktop, now… with Apple’s prices, that may be worth the trouble if you want a relatively cheap and powerful OS X machine, especially since you can build a machine more powerful than the entry level MacPro for a third of its price.
Yeah I tried it on a few desktop and a laptop but found the same problems. Some thing breaks on my brothers Hack every week it seems and he was the one who talked me into trying it. I found linux to be a similar experience but it is better with older hardware. With a hackintosh older hardware becomes a real problem.
For better or worse, Newton will never make a comeback while Steve Jobs is around.
Like Hypercard, anything created by John Sculley’s Apple is gone forever
Well the PDA market is absolutely dead, it has merged with the mobile phones to the smartphone market…
I tried osx on my pc last week (desktop) the ideneb 1.4 install went pretty smoothly, obviously the graphics card wasn’t supported (ati hd3200 onboard) (but vesa worked) sound worked, dvd burning didn’t work.
It’s nice but I could not see any advantage about it over running xubuntu.
I still don’t like itunes, prefer firefox above safari.
It’s fun to try but I’m really not desparete enough to buy one. I can live with linux and the odd windows box.
Edited 2009-04-30 09:48 UTC