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Guide to installing OS X on Lenovo IdeaPad S10

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After reading about how OS X was installed on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, I began toying with the idea of installing OS X on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. After all, the S10 has all the makings for a potentially great MacBook-like system - it has a bright 10.2 inch display, a fairly comfortable keyboard, a touch-pad WITH mouse buttons below it, upgradeable hard drive and memory, and a form factor and design that’s reminiscent of the MacBook itself.

Yet, would the same OS X distribution work on the S10?  The answer as it turns out is yes but not without some problems along the way. After combing through various forums and threads, I’ve decided to compile as much information as possible into a single web page so without further ado, here’s our guide to installing OS X on the IdeaPad S10.

It’s certainly not a complete guide but hopefully it’ll help get you started down this road. 

 

Before we begin, you’ll need the following:

  • A copy of the MSIWindosx86.iso distribution
  • An external USB DVD drive to boot the ISO from

Optionally, you might want to consider swapping out the SATA HDD for a new one (this will allow you to save the original XP install if you want that), and upgrading the system memory if you have 512MB installed like I do.

You also might want a spare USB flash drive handy for transferring files to the netbook later (since you’ll discover that networking doesn’t work out of the box).

The one thing I won’t go into details with is how you can get a hold of the MSI Wind OS X distribution. However, if you search around the net long enough,  you’ll quickly figure out how to get the ISO. More importantly, if you like having OS X on your S10, make sure to purchase a retail copy of Leopard from Apple. There’s a way to get the retail copy working on a system which I don’t describe here.

For my S10 OS X setup, I decided to upgrade my netbook’s hard drive and memory – upgrading the storage to a new 250GB SATA 2.5 inch drive and the memory to 1.5GB (via a 1GB SO-DIMM)

Now.. onto the steps.

Step 1: Connect your external USB DVD drive to the S10 and place the MSIWindOSX.iso DVD into the drive (you’ll notice my external drive is rather large!)

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Step 2: Boot up the S10 and check the BIOS to make sure that the USB DVD drive is listed BEFORE the hard drive (unless you have a fresh hard drive with no OS installed).  You should still probably check to see that the USB DVD drive shows up in the boot order. (Press F2 to get into the S10’s BIOS when you see the Lenovo splash screen)

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Step 3: Boot from the DVD ISO and wait a minute or so. You’ll see some text run by and then the Apple OS X setup dialog box.

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Step 4: Click forward until you see the “Welcome” screen. At this point bring up Disk Utility by selecting the menu item Utilities->Disk Utility.

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Once the disk utility is up, select the hard drive that you want to install OS X onto and create a new partition (assuming it’s a new drive). For my 250GB hard drive, I opted to create a single partition. Once the partition is created, exit the Disk Utility.

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Step 5: Now that the partition is ready, go back to the setup and continue the install. You’ll be asked a location to install the OS and you should see your hard drive here – go ahead and select it for installation. This portion of the install will take some time. I didn’t exactly time it but it was around 25 to 30 minutes long. Go ahead, make a cup of coffee; read a book; take a jog or take a nap.

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Step 6: Once the setup finishes, the netbook will reboot and you’ll see the OS X welcome animation. Once the animation finishes, you’ll see the initial setup screens. This is where I ran into my first problem.

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At the above dialog box, I selected “Do not transfer my information now” which resulted in an endless loop – sending me back to the beginning of the animated Welcome splash screens. While I tried a number of tactics to get around this, I ultimately opted to bypass the entire setup.

Step 7: To bypass the setup portion do the following (thanks to this link here for the info):

  • Power up the S10

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  • Boot OS X with the “-s” option

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  • Type the following commands:

“/sbin/fsck -fy

/sbin/mount -uw /”

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  • Change directory to the following location

“cd /Volumes/<name of your disk volume>/var/db”

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  • Create an empty “.AppleSetupDone” file by typing:

“touch .AppleSetupDone”

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  • Create your root password

“passwd“

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  • Now “exit” and and log in as root using the password you defined at the terminal

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Step 8: Log in with the root account and create a new user account

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Once logged in, you’ll notice right off the bat that some things don’t work. In particular, Wi-Fi, Sound, LAN, and Power Management fail to work after the initial install. To fix the Wi-Fi, do the following

Step 9: Time to fix some things – first the Wi-Fi:

  • Go to this thread in the InsanelyMac forum and download the bcm43xx_enabler_0.5.1pre.sh.zip file. Since networking doesn’t work on the S10, you’ll need to do this on another computer.
  • Unzip the file and extract the bcm43xx_enabler.sh file. Copy the file to a USB drive and then connect the USB drive to the S10
  • Once the drive is connected to the S10 and mounted in OS X, copy the shell script to a location on your hard drive. Open a terminal and run the following command (I stuck with default answers to the questions asked):

“./bcm43xx_enabler.sh”

  • Reboot the system
  • Once OS X comes back up, go to System Preferences and setup the new network interface 

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Step 10: Next fix - Perform a system update to 10.5.5 - yes.. it’s fine to update to 10.5.5.

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Step 11: Once the updates are downloaded and installed, the system will reboot and you’ll notice Wi-Fi no longer works and the display is incorrectly set to 800 x 600. 

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To fix Wi-Fi, just rerun the shell script from earlier.

To fix the display, you’ll need to download and install the Intel GMA 950 drivers.Thanks to this website here, I installed GMA 950 drivers using Kext Helper.

Once the files are downloaded, launch Kext Helper and then drag the three kext files from the 950 driver directory (AppleIntelGA950.kext, AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext, and Natit.kext) into the application. Put your admin/root password and then click “Easy Install”

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Now go ahead and reboot OS X and Wi-Fi and the display should be working again.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as I’ve gotten with OS X on the IdeaPad S10. Several things still fail including the onboard sound (even though there’s a speaker icon – just no sound output), Ethernet, and power management. Yet, if you don’t care about any of that, this is effectively a functional OS X system.

Summary

Lets quickly recap what works and what doesn’t work right now with OS X on the IdeaPad S10

What works

  • Intel GMA 950 Graphics
  • Broadcom Wi-Fi
  • Touchpad (no multi-touch) and touchpad buttons
  • Built-in Webcam
  • USB ports

What doesn’t work

  • Sleep (though some people have managed to get it to work, I unfortunately have not been able to)
  • Multi-touch does not work on touchpad
  • Touch-pad does not recognize button presses on the touch-pad itself (but the mouse buttons do work)
  • Ethernet
  • Sound

Not tested

  • ExpressCard slot

That’s it for now. As you can tell, it’s still a work in progress but for those of you that absolutely must have OS X on their IdeaPad S10, it’s definitely possible - though with some caveats for now. I’m sure over time, developers out there will find solutions for the problems listed here.

If you have an Lenovo IdeaPad S10 with OS X installed, please share your experiences here or in our forums.

Finally, here’s a really short video clip of the S10 booting up OS X.

Written by flung

October 13th, 2008 at 3:39 am

125,317 views

Posted in Lenovo, Netbook Hacks, Netbook News, Netbook Software, Netbook Tips, Netbooks

Tagged with , ,

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