UPDATE: This story has been edited from the original.
Yesterday, we covered the MSI Wind clone from Medion, the Akoya. The little netbook turned out to be a wonder, albeit with a few flaws. The one thing that would make it better? OS X. When I mentioned the plan in yesterday’s post, the comments covered all the usual flamewar bases. My favorite:
Not all of the responses were so silly. Gadget Lab reader and – it turns out – hacker extraordinaire Onetrack emailed. He and fellow hacker Stellarolla have put together a single-disk install. We’ll be posting a full how-to soon.
Some other methods are quite laborious: you need to first tweak the BIOS, install packages and then manually update kernel extensions. That might be fine for Linux, but it’s not the Mac Way. Onetrack and Stellarolla rolled in all the necessary parts, normally spread far and wide across the internet, and put them on a single DVD. It’s extremely Mac-Like. You put in the disk, reformat the Wind’s hard drive and run the installer. It works the exact same way as the real Mac installer, and (almost) everything "just works".
First, make sure you have an official retail copy of OS X 10.5 Leopard. Do not pirate the OS. I built a custom disk from my existing Leopard DVD (with the help of Stellarolla, who hopped in from time to time with iChat screen sharing — a quite spooky remote control application).
Because your Wind (or Akoya, or Advent) doesn’t have an optical drive, though, you need an external DVD drive. Or do you? One of the holy grails of Wind hacking is installing OS X from a USB thumb drive. The MSIWindosx86 folks have done this, and it works perfectly, once you have the USB drive prepared. The fact that I was up until 3AM this morning trying to do this is a reflection on my 1337 hacking skills rather than the actual install itself. In fact, the entire process is summed up in Onetrack’s instructions, as posted on the MsiWind Forums:
This morning I awoke to a freshly-minted USB stick containing my installer. I popped it in, still bleary eyed from sleep, and it worked. The installer fired up and looked just like every other time I have installed OS X. And the big advantage of the USB stick is speed: It’s a lot quicker than a DVD installation. On cup of coffee and a quick shower later and I was at this screen:
The signup process was normal:
In fact, apart from a few oddities, everything just works. The webcam turns out to be awful — a low-res piece of junk, but it works. The Wi-Fi card also works, but using a third party connection utility instead of the menu-bar drop down list. The mic and headphone jacks are dead, but Airtunes and an Airport Express take care of that, and right now the Ethernet is dead, although that is just a driver-install away.
All in, it actually runs OS X a lot faster than XP. If you have any questions on how things are working, leave them in the comments. If your questions are more technical, head to the Wind forums, or watch Onetrack’s video, below.
Finally, a big thank you to Stellarolla and Onetrack, who spent the best part of five or six hours on and off iChat helping me out.
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