Review: Mac OS X 10.5.6 on ASUS Eee PC 1000H

A quick review about my experiences with installing and playing around with Mac OS X 10.5.6 on the ASUS Eee PC 1000H. At this moment, I’ve run this setup for a few days and it’s been great so far.

Preparation & Installation

Before you can join the Hackintosh crowd, you have to get some stuff ready. First of all, you need iDeneb 1.4 with Mac OS X 10.5.6, download it from the usual sources.
Second, you will have to flash your BIOS with a customized one. This should be no problem, but to be save, flash the original BIOS back in case you delete Mac OS X and have to claim the warranty.

Also, an external optical drive is needed. While is seems possible to run iDeneb from an USB flash drive, I preferred the simplest approach and borrowed an external optical drive from my friend Adrian. I recommend a fresh installation if you have 10.5.5, although some users reported it worked for them. Upgrading to 10.5.7 may also be risky, I have no experience with that.

To install Mac OS X 10.5.6 on the ASUS Eee PC 1000H, I followed this excellent guide. Thanks to the community around the Eee PC at ipis-osx, almost everything works. After the OS X installation you will have to install some kext files to fix various issues. After that you should have a fully functional Hackintosh.

Performing some common tasks

Since netbooks where primarily made for browsing the Internet, the first thing I tried was Safari, which turns out to be a great web browser. I also installed Mozilla Firefox, works perfect, too.

The basic Apple apps are amazing. Compared to Windows, you have a nice suite of applications after installing iWork and iLife. Of course, you can also install the open-source office solution OpenOffice. Performance can be compared to performance under XP or an other alternative operating system. Only thing that was quite new to me, is that almost all good apps cost money.

Another thing is the possibility to plug in an external monitor for additional screen size. Guess what, works perfectly. Despite Mac OS X has not been made for netbooks, all important things work.

Only thing is battery life, which is definitly shorter than on the preinstalled Windows XP system. While 10.5.7 seems to dramatically increase battery life, I haven’t tested it yet.

Bottom line

The possibility to install Mac OS X on netbooks has been the first hands-on OS X experience for a lot of Windows users out there. While many people consider Macs too expensive, they now can try Apple’s superior operating system on their own cheap netbooks. Might turn a lot of them into switchers in the long run.

I guess, it’s not advisable to run this setup on a productive machine due to the lack of updates and uncertainties regarding it’s a hacked system. I experienced OS X as a very stable system and despite only running on an Atom processor, it’s very responsive. Another cool thing is that I never have to shut it down, I just close the lid and put it to sleep. I hope the wireless card I ordered from Hongkong will arrive soon and improve the wireless experience.

So, everybody who has an Eee PC and wants to experiment, just check it out! Mac OS X 10.5.6 on the ASUS Eee PC 1000H is great.