NetbookTech

MSI Wind owners who want or are running OS X on their respective netbooks have one more reason to celebrate. Official drivers for the Realtek Wi-Fi card have finally emerged although they are not available directly from Realtek. The drivers are currently floating around in the MSIWind.net forums and also available for download here and here. Cool stuff.

[Check it out via SlashGear]

Have netbook, will install OS X right? Of course! That’s exactly what the folks at Wired.com did with their new Samsung NC10 loaner (with permission from Samsung). They used similar steps to installing OS X on the MSI Wind and presto – OS X on the NC 10.

Now of course, all is not perfect in the OS X/NC10 world – here are some problems that are listed in the Wired.com article:

• USB ports no longer work
• Wi-Fi does not work
• Headphone port does not work

It’s no small secret that the NC10 is my favorite netbook to date – mostly due to the wonderful keyboard – a keyboard that’s arguably even better than the MSI Wind keyboard! Yes.. I am late with my reviews tho.. stay tuned!

[Check it out]

While we may not see an actual Apple branded netbook system anytime soon, this certainly hasn’t deterred folks from installing OS X on a netbook system. However, at least one person has taken this a step further by not only installing OS X but also physically modifying an MSI Wind netbook – making it look like what a possible Apple netbook could look like (if they would only make one of course). The end result? Say hello to the “MacBook Nano”.

The transformation process from an MSI Wind to the “MacBook Nano” also happens to be documented pictorially on Flickr.com. Very cool stuff though ..I can’t say that I will ever spend the time to do something like this.

[Check it out via eWeek, MacRumors.com]

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. 

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m still in the middle of writing up my guide to installing OS X on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. It’s taking just a little longer than I would like but in the meantime, if you’re curious how fast OS X boots up on the netbook, just check out the video clip I posted up on YouTube. OS X itself boots without a problem on the S10 – the problems are of course driver related. I’ll get into that once I finish up the article. In the meantime, enjoy this super short video clip.

UPDATE (10/13/2008) - The guide to installing OS X on the IdeaPad S10 is now up here.

What do you do when you really want OS X on a netbook but Apple won’t come out with an Apple branded netbook? You take some other vendor’s netbook and install OS X on it of course. That’s what this guy did with his Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. He grabbed a version of Leopard 10.5 that was actually customized for the MSI Wind netbook and got it running on the Inspiron Mini 9 (with some additional patches to get audio and Wi-Fi working too). In fact, he even patched his system to 10.5.5 with the system updates! Very nice!  In the comments section of the article, the author notes that the boot time for the system is 24 seconds and the entire install consumes around 7GB of disk space. If you’re interested in doing this then you should probably get the 16GB model of the Inspiron Mini. And as far as the OS X distribution that he used - it’s called “MSIWindosx86.iso” and can be found here.

Oh and if you do have an MSI Wind netbook, you can read this article here detailing how to install the same distro on the netbook. You’ll want to upgrade the memory and swap out the Wi-Fi card for a Dell Broadcom DW 1390 or 1490 internal mini-PCI Wi-Fi card to get things to work well.

If there’s anything Apple can learn from all of this, it’s this - there are people out there who love OS X and would love to see this OS available in a cheap small form factor system like a netbook. If Apple were to only create a comparable netbook system - heck maybe brand it as a MacBook Mini.. consider how many units it could possibly sell if it was priced around 400-500 dollars?

[Check it out via CrunchGear]

So you’re a Mac enthusiast and you’re wishing that Apple would release something like a netbook.. what do you do in the meantime? Take an existing netbook and install OS X on it of course! That’s what the folks at Wired’s Gadget Lab did with an MSI Wind netbook. The distro used for this hackery is known as “MSIWindosx86″ which includes all the necessary pieces to make OS X work on the MSI Wind netbook. Installation is apparently a piece of cake though some components won’t work under OS X (such as the Ethernet port and the microphone/headphone jacks). However Wi-Fi does indeed work (which should be enough for one’s networking needs I assume) so you still have some Internet access on the machine. You can read more about the hack job here at Wired.com’s Gadget Lab page. You should also check out the YouTube video detailing the OS X Leopard installation.

[Check it out via Ubergizmo]