Despite reports to the contrary, current Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard builds do not support the Intel Atom processor. The report that support had returned is a fake, and the most recent build 10C540 still does not support the Atom processor. C’est tout.
Stories like this make me glad that I don’t use any Apple products…
Its not really an Apple product though is it ! Apple make a set product line and Atom is not included … yeah i have used Hackintosh and it worked well on a Dell Mini9 and and EEEPC 900A but the users of those platforms should never have been under any illusion that this was a permanent deal … If you want the full Apple support buy a Mac …
Spot on.
Likewise, if you want a full-featured desktop that works really well and is supported on Dell Mini9 or on an EEEPC 900A, or indeed on any of quite an array of Atom-powered netbook machines, then download and install Kubuntu 9.10.
I have installed Kubuntu 9.10 on an EEEPC 1000H, on a MSI Wind U100 and on another obscure netbook, and it is working very well indeed on all three machines. The main recomendation that I have is to install firefox, then in the “about:config” page of firefox search for the varibale that includes the word “picker” and set that variable to true. Set firefox as the default browser in the System Settings – Preferred Applications. This is far better than Konqueror.
PS: If you want to get a netbook with Kubuntu 9.10 pre-installed for you, you can order exactly that from here:
http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16216
You will need to change the OS from the default setting.
Edited 2009-11-09 03:40 UTC
Have you tried rekonq? It is much alike crome but more integrated to kde.
Apple products generally work just fine with other Apple products.
As for the Atom processors, I wouldn’t hold my breath either way but the company really doesn’t need to spend time helping people not subsidising their operating system costs.
Well, yes. Precisely. Exactly so.
Also, mind you, mobile people who want to get things done easily and quickly while on the go, and who want an ultra-portable, lightweight, inexpensive but still full-featured machine, really don’t need to spend their money subsidising Apple.
Having just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release, I think that those people could ditch Windows and/or Mac OS X and be quite happy. I’m not quite able to do it yet, unfortunately, but consumers should enjoy the extra money they save, especially on netbooks.
…the line between blogging and journalism becomes blurred.
Yeah, journalists don’t lie or rush to publish something without checking the stories.
…Apple have no plans to support Atom, which may have been a possibility up until recently…
I have built a few “hacintosh’s” over the years, as recently as last week. But it was always just for fun, and they never have the same “feel” as the real thing, but still amazing to see OS X running on a “PC”. I prefer to put Ubuntu these days on PC’s, 9.10 is very suite!!!
I’m looking forward to 10.6.2, I’m hoping the OpenGL problems will be fixed (check out the screensaver Arabesque to see what I mean – it ran beautifully under 10.5.n).
I can’t imagine this putting any kind of stop to the hackintosh efforts on netbooks. If support was removed from the kernel, well Darwin is open source and could simply be recompiled with Atom support. If instead the os checks for a supported processor at boot time, the boot loader could pass it a false string relatively easily though some care would be needed in this case to avoid serious issues. Still, if Darwin need be recompiled it does mean back to the old system of using modified updates.
It is not just the kernel, it is also all of the libraries and even applications that must support the processor architecture. The entire software stack.
since when is atom an architecture? it’s still i386/x86 or is it?
What is special about the kernel that does not apply to the rest of the software stack?
When Atom chips first came out, most Linux distributions would not run on them. There were special projects which took normal Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu) and re-compiled everything with a special compiler flag.
So you are saying apple is compiling everything with a special atom compiler flag for the last 2 years?
Homor Simpson mode””uuuh what does this flag do…”
guess they don’t use GCC to compile
Edited 2009-11-09 13:09 UTC
The kernel presents an abstracted view of the hardware to userspace. If the whole software stack needed to be recompiled for a micro-architecture like Atom, then how come all your existing programs on Windows and Linux work on an Atom machine? You can’t tell me that the developer of Elastomania had ten years advance warning that Atom was going to be released?
What are you talking about? I can’t speak for Ubuntu, but I ran Slackware and Arch on some of the first Atom machines and there wasn’t any recompiling needed except some driver modules to support some of the netbook hardware. Also, if you didn’t notice, vanilla Windows XP/Vista/7 all run as well and you can’t tell me they’ve just happened to be using a special compiler flag all this time. Methinks maybe you are confusing Atom with some other chip?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_atom#Architecture
Hmmm, I think I may have not thought this through properly.
When I first got a machine with an Atom CPU, I tried it with several liveCDs. They all went into a “kernel panic” and wouldn’t boot. It wasn’t until a few months later when the next round of Linux distribution releases occurred that suddenly all of the new liveCDs being released would boot.
Then came this article, with its observation that it was quite possible to produce an OS that would run on x86 but not Atom.
I just assumed that Atom must lack some normally-assumed CPU extensions, I suppose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86#Extensions
But perhaps not. It is quite possible that all of the observations about x86 OSes not booting on Atom can be simply explained by a lack of drivers required by the kernel.
Not my experience. I got kernel panics for a few months after my first purchase of an Atom CPU, until the various Linux distribution maintainers caught up.
Edited 2009-11-09 22:48 UTC
Most Linux distributions ran just fine on the original Atom netbooks. They are x86-compatible CPUs after all. However, there were no drivers for the chipsets that came with the CPUs. Thus, you couldn’t use them to their fullest (no wireless, no graphics accel, etc). But the CPUs themselves were compatible.
I’ve had Debian Etch, and Kubuntu 8.04/8.10/9.04 running on Asus netbooks using Atom CPUs. The install ran just fine. What I could do after the install depended on the OS version, as some had drivers while others didn’.
Atom is X86 as is os x so the software stack is a non-issue.
Apple has never supported the Intel Atom CPU.
That it worked in the first place is purely luck.
The fact that the new versions of Mac OS X 10.6.x don’t work with the Atom should be expected. And it should be no news.
One can’t simply install Mac OS X on any Intel-based PC. It has to be the right CPU, the right components, etc. etc. With custom Apple hardware chips, this makes it more and more unlikely.
It was never meant to be in the first place since the license for Mac OS X prohibits it.
Isn’t it merely a bug in the hack? I video I saw of a machine booting it got as far as the logo screen and then crashed. I strongly doubt that it would ever get that far if they pulled the hooks for ATOM. Regardless, it was mere luck it ever worked in the first place, why so many (Are there really that many?) people are ticked off seems rather _DRAMA_ laden. Oh the pain, my crappy netbook won’t run OSEX, it only runs a more useful Windows and Linux, Oh the PAIN!! *whimper* It’s BETA software, deal with it