Once again I find myself in the position where I’m unable to test this for myself, namely because I’ve had problems getting Snow Leopard to install on any of my netbooks, but some people are reporting success with this. Therefore, with the intention of disseminating information and possibly helping some folks out, allow me to redirect you to Insanely Mac where there’s a forum thread with a patch and some translated instructions. (Scroll down to post 7 for short and sweet instructions.)
If it works for you, let others know!
I hesitated to post anything about this when it originally came out in one of the developer seeds that OS X 10.6.2, the latest update to Snow Leopard, had removed (or intentionally sabotaged unofficial) Atom support. It looked like that was certainly the case, and then a few days later another build had Atom support restored. However, 10.6.2 is officially out today and the various sites are reporting that Atom support is in fact gone.
This is going to be yet another one of those really quick posts where I apologize for not highlighting this sooner and also telling you that someone else (or a few, really) has done the leg work and that I’m going to point to their work as an excellent starting point. So, if you’re looking for info on installing and running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on your Asus Eee PC 1000HE, then do I ever have links for you!
First off, once again the folks from the smallcomputing.net forums have come through in a big way and have a thread already going that’s full of info, troubleshooting, and kexts that should be of great help to anyone who may not know where to start or is having trouble in the process. So, here’s the good stuff:
Ok, short and sweet. Want to know how to install retail (vanilla) OS X 10.5.7 on your Asus Eee PC 1000HE? Read the detailed forum post by LonelyTV on our forums here (it’s one of those awesome community efforts). No sense in me trying to reinvent the wheel, so click away already. I apologize for not having pointed this out to everyone sooner.
And since I know people will stumble onto this later with questions aplenty — there’s a lot of information in that thread as well as the forums in general. Even though some of these articles get a lot of comments, the answers are, frequently, already in the forums if you have a minute or two to poke around.
Cheers.
P.S. I’ve seen a lot of 1000HA and other variants mentioned in comments lately and all I can say is there’s no guarantee that the steps involved for installing on the 1000HE will work exactly the same on other models. Even though Asus makes all of these and they more or less have the same hardware, there are occasional differences in the netbook models that creates incompatibilities.
Just a quick site update more than anything, but I just popped said BCM4321 into my Samsung N120 netbook and wifi is working great (in the three minutes I’ve had to test it). For those who might be a little frightened by the somewhat in-depth breakdown required by the Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, the Samsung N120 netbook consists of thirteen screws and then just popping the case apart. Take old card out, put new one in, and you’re good.
So, how about some guide updates? (more…)
Update: 10.5.7 appears to be installed and working on my Samsung N120 netbook. At the lowest brightness setting (since brightness control is flaky in the Samsung N120 netbook) OS X is predicting over 7 hours of battery life (6 hours for the LCD at full brightness). This is up from ~5 in 10.5.6. Apple has definitely tweaked OS X for the Atom, or something close enough that it still affected it.
As you may or may not know, Apple released the 10.5.7 update to OS X just a couple of days ago, and reports are trickling in to various sites (including our forums here) and they seem to suggest that the 10.5.7 update adds support for Intel Atom CPUs. Furthermore, it would seem that officially (?) recognizing the CPU, Apple has worked out superior power management that is resulting in a significant boost to battery life.
Quick and dirty, this is not going to cover everything, but if you have an hour to kill, you will get OS X working on your Samsung N120 netbook, but don’t expect every last thing to work. Ready to get started? Grab your Samsung N120 netbook, iDeneb 1.4, and get these video kexts and let’s go to work.