My MacBook Wind

I voted in a poll over at msiwind.net for OS -- I assume, by OS, they mean the OS you're running on your Wind and here's an interesting discovery:



Mac OS X is finally getting ahead of Windows -- well, in this kind of game, at least.

Perhaps I took cue from the latest look my MacBook Wind desktop now sports so I adopted this new theme :D and I also obliterated that "Just another Wordpress blog". 

Apparently it does seem cool to have Mac OS X Leopard running on a PC, a netbook at that. Well, at least that's what my roomie thinks.

She bought herself a new Asus 1000H and requested that I transform it into a Mac. Short of explaining to her that I really am not transforming her netbook into a Mac, since installing OS X is different from transforming her hardware into an Apple one. It would require magic and my powers were limited to hacking techniques I didn't even invent in the first place. 

To cut the story short, this entire week was devoted to installing Leopard on her Asus 1000H. And boy was it difficult!

First, I only had the msiwindosx86 slipstream DVD installer which is customized specifically for the MSI Wind, not the Asus 1000H. But I still trudged on, crossing my fingers and hoping against all odds that it would work.

1 try:

I plugged in my external DVD drive to the Asus 1000, slapped in the msiwindosx86 DVD and rebooted. Darwin loaded but I got stuck at a cryptic line along the way, never getting to the graphical installation program.

2 try:

Again, I went scrounging the net for some clue and found out that you can't install OS X on the 1000H without flashing your BIOS with a compatible one that you get from here.

It worked. All but sound. And try as I might, there wasn't anything I could to make audieee work.

So, being true to my nature, I opted to do another fresh install as I thought this glitch might be caused by the fact that I didn't uncheck the patched kernel during install. According to the tutorials, it's important that the vanilla kernel be used if you want audieee to work.

3rd try:

Reinstallation success with the patched kernel left unchecked. But I got stuck at the welcome/configuration step, where I kept getting the Spinning Beach Ball of Death when I clicked on "Do Not Transfer blah blah" option.

I hit the net again, and found that I needed to interrupt Darwin during loading and at the "boot:" prompt, type:

-s

/sbin/fsck -fy

/sbin/mount -uw /

touch /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

(entering each line one by one)

and the change root's password so I could log in to the system later.

passwd root

After several tries, and I dunno why I had to try more than once since it's supposed to work at the first try, I was rocking :D

I installed audiee, which was just a matter of dragging the unzipped app to the Applications folder.

And hop-la! We got sound! :D

It has been almost 2 months since I first installed OS X Leopard on my pearl white MSI Wind, thus producing my MacBook Wind. And I don’t know if that spiffy Leopard intro movie is to be held accountable but I installed and reinstalled about 3 times in the first 2 weeks ever since I had the DVD installer with me.

I experimented with the kexts and fixes combined with the updates (10.5.5 and 10.5.6) just to see which broke in which etc. For one, now I know that the Sonix webcam would work if you update QuickTime to 7.5 without having to go to 10.5.5. Updating to 10.5.5 from 10.5.4, which is default for the msiwindosx86 DVD install, does break your video bringing resolution down to a squashed 800 x 600, sound, and trackpad (mine’s Sentellic) but not your keyboard. Updating from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6 breaks all of the four.

After my 3rd fresh installation, I thought of just sticking with that setup for a while. No problem as it was December already and the holidays were coming, leaving me with little time to spare for tinkering. In fact, it was my New Year’s resolution to let a month pass without wiping out my hard drive again for yet another reinstall.

It wasn’t so hard to live with an aging installation after all. XP in my PC at the office is already a year and a half. It’s sluggish alright, but still working. So I thought that if OS X’s Unix origins lived up to its claim to glory, my hackinstosh MacBook Wind shouldn’t have any troubles going for a far better record than that.

I was trudging along fine, installing Parallels and running XP on virtual machine for when I wanted to use Word 2003 with Wordfast for those translation workloads I just had to finish at the apartment after office hours. Of course I had Office:Mac 2008 installed but my CAT Tool, Wordfast, isn’t compatible with it. I could access the net at coffee shops and even while I ate my fries at the Jollibee branch at the other end of our street.

But it came to a point that I noticed it took so long to boot up to OS X lately. It’s not blazing fast as the stock Xandros on the Eee PC but as far as I can remember, the boot up time should at least be as decent as XP’s. That was when I started timing boot times. My iPod timer recorded a molasses like average of 1 min. 20 sec.

I resorted to the forums and found out I wasn’t only the one with this problem. However, I also found at that about 80% of the MSI Wind hackintoshers experienced 30 seconds - less than a minute boot times. I am irked beyond compare.

So, with the little knowledge I gained from my installation experiments, I decided to wipe out my hard drive again. All my files were practically living somewhere in my iPod so backing up was totally an irrelevant step for me.

Here’s what I did:

1) Reinstalled from msiwindosx86 DVD - out of the box, everything worked great as it should. Except WiFi, Webcam. Issues with the mic and audio out to headphone jack are not included in the problem, I didn’t use these a lot and so it doesn’t bother me to wait for the VooDoo AppleHDA to be released. I didn’t install any apps yet.

2) Updated to 10.5.5 - I knew my trackpad would break so I plugged in a mouse. My keyboard was working fine and that’s about all I need to enter my admin password to install the 10.5.6 update.

3)Updated to 10.5.6 - My mouse was still working fine but my keyboard was bricked. It was time to install the kexts and such and as I didn’t have an external keyboard, I just activated the keyboard viewer from System Preferences. This allowed me to use the virtual keyboard which I could summon from the menu bar.

4) Installed the kexts - It was no problem finding kexts from the net but there are lots of versions out there, you end up confused so you download everything you find in the end and then install them all in the end just to be on the safe side.

This is when experimenting becomes useful. I used Paul’s Wind Driver Set but swapped out some parts like for the video, I used the non-artifact Intel GMA 950, downloaded from the forums at msiwind.net again.

At each step, I recorded the boot up times. When Darwin starts, I intervene with the countdown to 5 and then hit Enter with my right hand as my left triggers the timer in my iPod.

I started with 00:00:55.662. Next 00:00:50.617. Lastly 00:00:38.194.

Unbelievable! I was expecting to see boot up times that worsened at each update but the results clearly showed otherwise.

I’m not sure if it was the kexts affecting the boot times. The 303 kexts I backed up running on my system via OSx86 Tools is hardly a minimal figure. So it might have been the combination of updates and kext installation in between that’s a more probable candidate as a culprit.

I've installed all the apps I wanted and am still getting a not too shabby 00:00:40.757.

I’m just happy Leopard is now living up to its supposedly inherent feline speeds.   

yum! nope, it isn't Vanilla flavored cake much as I want it to be. Those two words are actually part of the new parlance I had no choice but to acquire in choosing to be a hackintosher.

Vanilla seems to pertain to the kernel version and kext, I've only discovered this fairly recently, means "kernel extension".

Right. All I know is that I had to download the appropriate kexts to get me running.

After two previous netbooks, the Eee PC 701 and the Eee PC 900, I finally got the MSI Wind U100.

It's supposed to be the Linux version that I got from E-hub, which didn't include any OS when I bought it, not even Ubuntu. Apparently, the label "Linux version" meant "without any OS installed" for MSI. I remember having Xandros when I got my Eee PC's. Weird.

Anyway, a rundown on the specs first:

1.6 GHz Atom N270
1 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB WD SATA
802.11 b/g
10" LED wide screen LCD
Webcam
Mic
No internal bluetooth

Pretty much the generic netbook specification. The unit set me a comfortable 19,999 Php. I would've have wanted the XP Home version which had the internal bluetooth module but the hard drive for that model's only 80 GB and costed 24,950 Php.

I figured out I'd rather have the bigger cappacity hard drive 19,999 Php model and then add a separate bluetooth usb dongle for a better deal.

After two previous netbooks, the Eee PC 701 and the Eee PC 900, I finally got the MSI Wind U100.

It's supposed the Linux version that I got from E-hub, which didn't include any OS when I bought it, not even Ubuntu. Apparently, the label "Linux version" meant "without any OS installed" for MSI. I remember having Xandros when I got my Eee PC's. Weird.

Anyway, a rundown on the specs first:

1.6 GHz Atom N270
1 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB WD SATA
802.11 b/g
10" LED wide screen LCD
Webcam
Mic
No internal bluetooth

Pretty much the generic netbook specification. The unit set me a comfortable 19,999 Php. I would've have wanted the XP Home version which had the internal bluetooth module but the hard drive for that model's only 80 GB and cost24,950 Php.

I figured out I'd rather have the bigger capacity hard drive 19,999 Php model and then add a separate blue tooth USB dongle for a better deal. I was even inspired to buy Windows XP Home separately from E-hub too and the total cost came at only 23,799 Php, still cheaper.

Next I got the msiwindosx86 DVD from a fellow forumer as  I didn't have decent broadband connection at home and proceeded with the experiment.

(You can google for the msiwindosx86 ISO on the net for download)

Installation:

I didn't want to erase Win XP entirely yet and opted to dual boot. So bearing in mind what I read on the forums that I would have to partition my drive to create space for my new kitty, I resorted to:

1. boot up with Mandriva live CD, pretend to install it. I was able to resize my Windows partition and create a new partition on the drive, giving me 80 GB for Windows and another 80 GB for OS X.

2. That done, I rebooted the machine, held down F11 to get to my boot options. Swapped the Mandriva live CD with the msiwindosx86 DVD and chose my external DVD drive to boot from.

3. Some text appeared and I waited for about a couple of minutes before the OS X Installer GUI appeared. I chose the language and ran Disk Utility to format the partition I'd just created: HFS+journaled.

[gallery]

4. I then chose the partition, or as indicated by the installer program, "Drive" where I wanted to put Leopard.

5. I cancelled installer verification because I was so excited and the installation went through quite smoothly.

6. After about an hour, I was greeted with the Leopard welcome screen--it was breathtaking to see the word "welcome" fly across outer space my LCD in different language and with that equally cool background music. I think that was the moment I officially became an Apple fan girl

As I was running a mere hackintosh, Steve Job's "it just works" moniker does not hold 100% true for my OS X experience. I've had to search into nooks and crannies of forums all over the net and hack away for hours at the least up to days when things are just a jumble of spaghetti mess.

One thing thing that doesn't work out of the box even installing with the slip streamed custom installer that is msiwindosx86, are the webcam, WiFi, and mic.

But thanks to persistent people over at the msiwind.net forums, RealTek released a driver for the WiFi module in the MSI Wind.

I downloaded it from one of the links posted on the forums File sharing accounts would expire now and then so I'm not providing a link to download it. I suggest you hit the forums at msiwind.net and you'd find someone renewing the download links.

I was saved from having to buy a replacement compatible WiFi module and consequently from voiding my warranty by opening up my wind. And though I had to use the RealTek WLAN utility that was pesky enough to auto launch each and every login, I was a  happy camper.



The same happened more or less with my webcam:  it spit out only green garbage in Photo Booth. So, as usual, I hit the forums again, and was told to update my version Quick Time to the latest. I was skeptical since my mindset was on weird "take off the battery for a couple of minutes or so then put it back" etc, but I gave it a try and downloaded the latest Quick Time for mac from the apple.com and low and behold, I the next time I fired up Photo Booth, I saw my face plastered on the screen.

I was fortunate enough to have the Sonix webcam which turned out to be functional in OS X. Others with the Bison v .3 weren't as lucky.