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Hello everyone. In a nutshell it is working well for me execpt for USB and sleep. Below are what I did to get it running. I am looking for tips on getting the last USB and sleep bugs worked out. The card readers should work if a driver gets released by jmicron.
I picked up a Blue Aspire One with 120GB hard disk from MicroCenter today. The Marietta GA store had 40+ of them in stock when I got mine, so they are showing up in retail in force.
First off I fired it up in Windows to make sure it all worked out of the box. After that I ripped the system open and added a 1gb DIMM and swapped out the wifi card for a Dell 1390. In theory the factory installed Atheros wifi card SHOUD be supported by 10.5, but as noted in other posts the Acer bios is doing weird things to it. If you want wifi you need to swap the card out. See if you have a friend with a recent model Dell with a 1390 (b/g) or 1490 (a/b/g) card that will swap with you. The Atheros b/g card will work fine in the Dell. Booted back into Windows and loaded the Dell driver for the WIFI manually. Tested it all again and then backed up the entire factory disk install with Ghost. The system is now ready to be wiped out.
I am not covering any dual boot stuff. I just wanted this to be a super portable mac. Once I have it all setup the way I want it and cloned off to another disk, I am going to use another portable USB disk to install with WinXP or Vista on to load my network admin tools on to have handy when I travel. I don't need them 90% of them time.
Boot Disk Setup:
To start the Mac 10.5 install I did the following. I did not want to mess with getting a USB DVD drive for this as I have several usb disks and an existing Mac system that I could restore the install image to the USB disk from. If you want to stick one of the OS 10.5 installers onto a USB hard disk or flash disk to install from you MUST have an existing Mac system running to have the tools to do so (Real mac or another hackintosh system). You can skip this section if you have a USB DVD drive.
I downloaded the MSIWindosx86.iso installer image that was custom build for the MSI Wind as it has most Atom drivers and the 10.5.4 update all in one.
I partitioned an external USB disk as HFS+ Extended Journaled with the option flag set to be an MBR disk with Disk Utility on the MBP. I then mounted the image and used Disk Utility to restore the image to the USB disk. I then used OSX86Tools to make the usb disk bootable with the Chameleon EFI boot loader.
To do the same, load up OSX86Tools and select Install EFI/Run Fdisk and follow the prompts. Select 4 for Chameleon. Next select the USB disk by number (ie: /dev/disk1 is 1). Finally select the partition number on the USB disk (again likely 1). Let it run and ignore any errors. Once done the usb disk should be ready to boot the Aspire One from.
Installer Boot:
Once I booted the the Aspire One from the usb disk, I opened Disk Utility from the installer and the repartitioned the internal hard with a single MBR partition formated HFs+ Extended Journaled . Then I quit Disk Utility and ran the installer. Under customize for the install, I left all options selected. After about an hour, the installer was done and rebooted the system. I disconnected the usb drive and let the system boot from the internal disk.
System came right up without issues and ran the startup wizard. Once done, everything just worked with the exception of the following:
Flash Card Readers (These are PCI bus based and need a custom mac driver from JMicron if they will every work. Don't count on seeing a driver like this unless some oem sticks that chipset on a PCI-e card for the mac market which is highly unlikely.)
Flash readers on other systems that work on the Mac are USB based and the OS has generic drivers for those.
Sound (There is a driver that works, details below)
System Sleep (crashes on sleep/wake, need help making this work)
USB devices plugged in post boot (system profiler can see them, but you can't use them. If plugged in during boot, they work just fine. Need help fixing this as well.)
I then loaded the following drivers:
Latest ethernet driver from Realtek for the onboard ethernet nic (the custom os installer has one on it but I wanted to make sure I have the latest vendor supported one). Just go to http://www.realtek.com.tw and get the mac driver for the RTL8102E-GR.
This sound package and shutdown fix from (Read the directions in the post to install):
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=96434&pid=821946&mode=threaded&start=
The file for download has BOTH the ALC268 sound drivers and the fix needed to keep the system from crashing on shutdown.
I just installed the ALC268_Installer1 to load the driver, it worked on my system and I did not need to load the ALC268_Installer2. Just follow the directions in that post I linked to.
After the final reboot, sound works but you need to go to the sound system preferences and then the output tab to turn the menu bar volume back on. You can also switch from the internal speaker to the headphone jack there. The system can't auto-switch when you plug in headphones. I have not tested the mic or the line-in input.
Conclusion:
At this point I have a very usable system except that I need to reboot to use a new usb device and I can't put the unit to sleep.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting sleep and the USB system working right? I have read many posts looking for fixes but have gotten lost with the info given. A lot of the posts do not make sense and other bits seem to be missing key steps to actually work. I am trying to take a many notes as possible to post here.
I think the speedstep/acpi things are working, but I am not sure yet. Once I get sleep and usb working I will look in to them to make sure the fans and power management is working at it's best.
Miles
I picked up a Blue Aspire One with 120GB hard disk from MicroCenter today. The Marietta GA store had 40+ of them in stock when I got mine, so they are showing up in retail in force.
First off I fired it up in Windows to make sure it all worked out of the box. After that I ripped the system open and added a 1gb DIMM and swapped out the wifi card for a Dell 1390. In theory the factory installed Atheros wifi card SHOUD be supported by 10.5, but as noted in other posts the Acer bios is doing weird things to it. If you want wifi you need to swap the card out. See if you have a friend with a recent model Dell with a 1390 (b/g) or 1490 (a/b/g) card that will swap with you. The Atheros b/g card will work fine in the Dell. Booted back into Windows and loaded the Dell driver for the WIFI manually. Tested it all again and then backed up the entire factory disk install with Ghost. The system is now ready to be wiped out.
I am not covering any dual boot stuff. I just wanted this to be a super portable mac. Once I have it all setup the way I want it and cloned off to another disk, I am going to use another portable USB disk to install with WinXP or Vista on to load my network admin tools on to have handy when I travel. I don't need them 90% of them time.
Boot Disk Setup:
To start the Mac 10.5 install I did the following. I did not want to mess with getting a USB DVD drive for this as I have several usb disks and an existing Mac system that I could restore the install image to the USB disk from. If you want to stick one of the OS 10.5 installers onto a USB hard disk or flash disk to install from you MUST have an existing Mac system running to have the tools to do so (Real mac or another hackintosh system). You can skip this section if you have a USB DVD drive.
I downloaded the MSIWindosx86.iso installer image that was custom build for the MSI Wind as it has most Atom drivers and the 10.5.4 update all in one.
I partitioned an external USB disk as HFS+ Extended Journaled with the option flag set to be an MBR disk with Disk Utility on the MBP. I then mounted the image and used Disk Utility to restore the image to the USB disk. I then used OSX86Tools to make the usb disk bootable with the Chameleon EFI boot loader.
To do the same, load up OSX86Tools and select Install EFI/Run Fdisk and follow the prompts. Select 4 for Chameleon. Next select the USB disk by number (ie: /dev/disk1 is 1). Finally select the partition number on the USB disk (again likely 1). Let it run and ignore any errors. Once done the usb disk should be ready to boot the Aspire One from.
Installer Boot:
Once I booted the the Aspire One from the usb disk, I opened Disk Utility from the installer and the repartitioned the internal hard with a single MBR partition formated HFs+ Extended Journaled . Then I quit Disk Utility and ran the installer. Under customize for the install, I left all options selected. After about an hour, the installer was done and rebooted the system. I disconnected the usb drive and let the system boot from the internal disk.
System came right up without issues and ran the startup wizard. Once done, everything just worked with the exception of the following:
Flash Card Readers (These are PCI bus based and need a custom mac driver from JMicron if they will every work. Don't count on seeing a driver like this unless some oem sticks that chipset on a PCI-e card for the mac market which is highly unlikely.)
Flash readers on other systems that work on the Mac are USB based and the OS has generic drivers for those.
Sound (There is a driver that works, details below)
System Sleep (crashes on sleep/wake, need help making this work)
USB devices plugged in post boot (system profiler can see them, but you can't use them. If plugged in during boot, they work just fine. Need help fixing this as well.)
I then loaded the following drivers:
Latest ethernet driver from Realtek for the onboard ethernet nic (the custom os installer has one on it but I wanted to make sure I have the latest vendor supported one). Just go to http://www.realtek.com.tw and get the mac driver for the RTL8102E-GR.
This sound package and shutdown fix from (Read the directions in the post to install):
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=96434&pid=821946&mode=threaded&start=
The file for download has BOTH the ALC268 sound drivers and the fix needed to keep the system from crashing on shutdown.
I just installed the ALC268_Installer1 to load the driver, it worked on my system and I did not need to load the ALC268_Installer2. Just follow the directions in that post I linked to.
After the final reboot, sound works but you need to go to the sound system preferences and then the output tab to turn the menu bar volume back on. You can also switch from the internal speaker to the headphone jack there. The system can't auto-switch when you plug in headphones. I have not tested the mic or the line-in input.
Conclusion:
At this point I have a very usable system except that I need to reboot to use a new usb device and I can't put the unit to sleep.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting sleep and the USB system working right? I have read many posts looking for fixes but have gotten lost with the info given. A lot of the posts do not make sense and other bits seem to be missing key steps to actually work. I am trying to take a many notes as possible to post here.
I think the speedstep/acpi things are working, but I am not sure yet. Once I get sleep and usb working I will look in to them to make sure the fans and power management is working at it's best.
Miles
