MACinations

… because there are always alternatives…

Caveat: The “legitimacy” of this may or may not be questionable – many claim that by merely attempting it I have broken Apple’s EULA for Snow Leopard, etc. etc. etc. Personally, I doubt it – I paid RETAIL for my copy of Snow Leopard, and it’s up to me what I do with it.

Until Apple release a small form factor machine (10″) or a workable tablet, this satisfies a personal need for a small portable machine.

Having said that, I’m happy to provide the instructions, but the risks are all yours..:-)

Apple have repeatedly stated that they “don’t know how to make a cheap netbook”, essentially that they don’t see the benefit to having a small (10″ max screen size) machine. The closest they ever came, as far as I can find, would have been the 12″ G4 Powerbook (long discontinued). Nice, but still too large – my 4yo daughter has one and they really do come in handy.

I resigned myself to having a non-Apple netbook – something small I could carry (generally) everywhere to dump the digital camera to, check email on the road, play the odd movie, etc. After all, the MacbookPro 15″ is a beautiful machine, but it gets a bit of a hassle carrying it about everywhere, plus the battery life on the 1000HE is stunning at a claimed 9.5 hours. MY OS of choice would be Linux (a Debian derivative, Linux Mint or CrunchBang Linux), and dual-booting with Windows 7  – which, to my surprise, I find I actually like when I have to run it !

I came across a number of articles recently about getting OS X to run on non-Apple hardware – specifically the 1000HE and other small netbook-type machines. Worth a try, I thought – after all, anything that removes the need to run Windows on a daily basis can’t be all bad…:-)

Here’s a rewrite of the instructions I have found on various sites, but most recently on Stephane Thirion’s site, which worked first time, albeit with a little tweaking.

Please note that this was written for the 10.6.1 release of Snow Leopard. I have just gotten 10.6.2 working, albeit a little sneakily, and those notes will appear at the end of this entry.

I will also put links to locally-stored copies of the relevant files you will need, just in case their page(s) are unreachable.

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Firstly, a few basic requirements.

• EEEPC 1000HE – In fact, this should work on pretty much any ASUS netbook
• A working Mac with Snow Leopard installed – this can be 10.6.2 as we are not coping files from this machine.
• An external hard drive or USB key – given that a full Snow Leopard install appears to be a tad under 8Gb a hard drive is the better choice unless you have a 16Gb key.
• A Snow Leopard install DVD – purchase from your local Apple store or online from Apple.

* * Do NOT ask for copies of Snow Leopard – you will not get a reply. It’s only $30 !  Don’t be a tight-ass !! * *

And a few tools are required:

• Kexts from rcfa at http://www.zshare.net/download/66089613f77ee41a/
• NetbookBootMaker at http://code.google.com/p/netbook-installer/downloads/list (note: not NetbookInstaller, it doesn’t seem to work)
• SuperDuper disk cloner at http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
• KextHelper, from http://cheetha.net/

Simple steps:

Here’s where a simple mistake can undo all of your hard work – or, more importantly, nuke your working machine. Check, recheck and double check – and ask if you’re unsure.

1. Format the USB device with DiskUtility – make sure you have selected a GUID partition type
2. Boot your working Mac from the Snow Leopard Installation DVD and install it on the EXTERNAL USB DEVICE.
3. Boot from external USB drive, perform all upgrades, e.g. to 10.6.1, software installs (XCode etc). I’ve found that it doesn’t matter whether you update now or after the install, speed is about the same.
4. Install SuperDuper, NetbookBootMaker and kextHelper on the external drive, as well as the kexts.  Better to have everything in one place.
5. Shut your Mac down and boot holding down the OPTION key. Select the EXTERNAL USB DRIVE and wait for the machine to boot.
6. Run NetbookBootMaker and select your EXTERNAL USB DRIVE as the destiunation, (if you pick the wrong disk you regular mac will stop working)
7. Fire up KextHelper and drag the .kext files to it. Enter your admin password and click INSTALL – it will put the files in the right place (/System/Library/Extensions) and check that permissions are correct.
8. Copy dsdt.aml, dsdt.dsl, smbios.plist, com.apple.Boot.plist from the downloaded kext file to /Extra.
9. Shut down, remove the EXTERNAL USB DRIVE and plug it in to your netbook. Power on the netbook and hit ESC to bring up the boot device selection menu. Select the EXTERNAL USB DRIVE. If all has gone well up to this point you should have a slow-ish Hackintosh running from the EXTERNAL USB DRIVE.
10. Fire up Disk Utility and format the INTERNAL drive f your netbook. Make sure you select GUID partition formatting, and format the drive as a Mac HFS Journaled drive. You can make the partition whatever size you like, but I’m assuming here that the whole drive is dedicated to OS X. We’ll tackle multiple booting later.
11. Fire up SuperDuper.app again and clone the EXTERNAL USB DRIVE to the INTERNAL one. Be VERY careful here, otherwise you might just end up cloning a blank drive, and undoing all your previous work. This will take some time – on my 1000HE from a USB drive it took something like 40 minutes.
12. When SuperDuper is finished its’ work, fire up NetbookBootMaker and this time select the INTERNAL drive as the destination.
13. Assuming no errors are thrown, reboot the netbook and you should have a fully functioning OS X 10.6.1 “Hackintosh”

OS X 10.6.2  UPDATE

Apple had intimated that 10.6.2 would “break” support for all ATOM processors, the processor-du-jour for many netbooks, and then said they had relented. Bollocks – it DOES break support for the Atoms, but I have found a workaround.

This involves some small amount of edition of binary files, but it’s not that hard. Here’s what you do;

On your 10.6.1 Hackintosh

1. Logon as a user with administrative, or “root”, privelages.
2. Download a plist editor – Apple has made the plist files binary instead of the old text files because of people like us..:-)  I’d suggest PlistEdit Pro from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/plisteditpro.html and install it.
   
3. Open a terminal sessionNow we’ll make a backup copy of the file(s) we’re going to touch. Not only is this good practice, but it actually makes the upgrade easier. The BOLD text is what YOU type in. <ENTER> means “press ENTER here”.
4. In the terminal session, enter the following command (or copy and paste this – it IS case sensitive).orac:~ jon$ su<ENTER>
   Password: <enter ROOT password><ENTER>
   sh-3.2# cp /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist.macbook<ENTER>
   sh-3.2# cp /mach_kernel /mach_atom<ENTER> What these commands have done is;
   • Logged you in as ROOT (the “super user”)
   • Backed up a boot file. Just in case we stuff it up…:-)
   • Copies the mach_kernel, the “guts” of the operating system, to another file that will be used to boot on an ATOM-based machine. This is also to stop the update service overwriting our known working one.
5. Close the terminal session – we won’t be using it again here.
6. Fire up PlistEdit Pro that you installed in step 2 above.
7. Using the standard File -> Open menu item, you will probably not find the file as it is “hidden”, so in PlistEdit Pro type “com.apple.Boot.plist” (without quotes) in the search field
8. When you get a result (you SHOULD only get one, but just in case…) check the bottom “status” line of the PlistEdit pro screen to make sure the path to the file is something like; Hackintosh -> Extra -> com.apple.Boot.plistIf you see anything else here, check, check and check.
9. Double-click on the file to open it
10. You will see a line in the top 1/2 of the screen that says;
    Kernel          String          mach_kernel
    It should be about the third line down in that panel.
11. Change that line so it now reads;
    Kernel          String          mach_atom
    
12. Save the file and quit PlistEdit Pro.
13. You can now run the 10.6.2 Update, safe in the knowledge that your working kernel won’t be overwritten with the new non-Atom processor one.

One word of advice: do NOT erase your EXTERNAL USB DRIVE until AFTER you have confirmed that the above trick has worked. The way to tell will be after doing the 10.6.2 Update and rebooting, if you go to About This Mac you will see the version 10.6.2 in that dialogue.

In fact, once I tweaked my install on the external drive and had everything working, I burned it to a dual layer DVD so I have a permenant fix now.