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Mac OS 10.5/Leopard on the Samsung NC10

Initially I ordered a Dell Inspiron 910/Mini 9, after reading about how easy it was to get Leopard running on these machines. However, after initially quoting 15 days delivery then then, on the 15th day, extended this to 30 days – at which point I cancelled the order.

Instead, due to its looks and frankly astonishing battery life, I ordered a Samsung NC10.

As it turns out, although all Atom netbooks are created equal, some are more equal than others – especially where OS X compatibility is concerned…

Note that I’m doing an install straight of my Leopard retail DVD – more success may be had with one of the various hacked install DVDs which can be downloaded from the usual places. Arr.

The Good (or, What Works)

  • Keyboard & Volume controls (but not brightness controls, the Euro key, or the pipe key which usually lives to the left of “Z”);
  • Trackpad;
  • All three USB ports (although I’ve not yet tried booting without any devices plugged in);
  • Integrated USB webcam;
  • Integrated Bluetooth;
  • Sleep – which unlike some other netbooks, just works perfectly. You do have to hit the power button to resume, though. Safe Sleep/Hibernate doesn’t seem to work right now, but one of the hacked drivers may have disabled it. The machine was in use for several hours yesterday and asleep overnight, but it still showing over 4 hours battery life 🙂
    This post suggests that this is now a solved problem
    I now notice that sleep only seems to work if the machine is running from batteries… if you tell it to sleep on mains power then it will do so, but then wake again a couple of seconds later. Odd.

The Bad (or, What Doesn’t Work out-of-the-box)

  • Intel HDA Audio (but it does with the AppleAzaliaAudio.kext, link below!);
  • Atheros AR424/5007EG 802.11a/b/g MiniPCIe wireless card;
  • Marvell 88e8040 on-board PCIe network interface;
  • Any resolution other than 800×600 on the GMA950 graphics adapter (but it does with the replacement AppleIntelGMA950 kexts);
  • Any way to alter screen brightness;
  • Leopard itself – after installing, the Welcome/Migration Assistant proceeds to where it tries to setup networking, finds no network interfaces, quits and reloads itself (but only if it cannot find any network interfaces – which is the case on a stock NC10 if no USB ethernet adapter is plugged in).

The Ugly (or, What Can Be Made To Work Possibly Involving The Use Of A Large Stick…)

  • I have a Dell 1490 MiniPCIe card arriving from eBay, as these are supported under OS X, which should hopefully largely solve the ethernet and post-install problems (although the on-board ethernet looks to be a bust);
  • The Intel Graphics can be convinced to work through the use of a hacked driver – although this is apparently also possible by changing a PCI Device ID string in the existing driver, which is a solution I’d be happier with. Once the replacement Wifi card arrives, I’ll reinstall and try this method.
  • Another string edit, or if I hook up a CD drive to run a Linux LiveCD and get a dump of the audio codec data, should make it possible to coax sound into working – although it appears that switching between headphones and speakers will still be (at best) a manual process…

So, not completely infeasible but there’s still quite a bit which needs fixing…

More as I run into it.

40 replies on “Mac OS 10.5/Leopard on the Samsung NC10”

Stuart, thanks for posting those links to the Dell installation instructions! The ISO posted that thread did the job! Working keyboard, touchpad, full resolution + QE! Sound works with your the link you posted, although I haven’t copied the kext to the EFI partition yet.

Could I ask you for a really big favor? If possible could you upload the contents of your /Volumes/EFI/Extensions directory to mediafire or a similar site? I’m sure your current setup is a lot more refined and it would take me ages to get around all those tweaks.

I’d also like to update to 10.5.5 via the Software Updater. Have you done that yet? According to the general idea of booting from the EFI partition it should be possible.

Again my deepest gratitude for your great work!

As I mentioned at the start of the topic, I was actually planning to do all of this on a Dell in the first place! 😉

I did update to 10.5.5, but did so by downloading the Combo Updater from Apple’s Downloads site. Having said that, I do this for my real Macs too, because if you use the Delta updater then some files are left not matching their receipts, and so Disk Utility complains about them if you ‘Repair Permissions’.

Bear in mind that you should have all your kexts on the EFI partition prior to upgrading, though, as the update is liable to change them in unhelpful ways…

Interestingly, I didn’t get full resolution until I updated the supplied GMA950 kexts, so there may be a new version included, or your setup might be slightly different to mine… Do you see occasional corruption when using iTunes? I get things like blocks rendered out of place, or the mouse cursor appearing to stick on the window.

I’m just sanitising my kext collection over the next few days – I want to swap dsmos.kext for AppleDecrypt.kext (which is apparently 20% faster), try to get HDA Audio working (for headphone output) with a Linux codec dump, and see whether the native GMA950 driver can be convinced to work by adding EFI strings to com.apple.Boot.plist.

Yeah I see, what a good thing though that you decided to use that Dell Mini boot ISO!

I’ve just done the update to 10.5.5 and it went flawless! What a great experience to install the update directly from Apple without anything breaking. I managed to get bluetooth to work fully (I couldn’t connect to a bluetooth PAN under 10.5.1) but the speeds for internet access using the PAN are painfully slow. Luckily I have other backup plans how to access the internet when I’m on the road. Since I own a WM phone I used WMWifiRouter for the moment which works great.

I do get the artifacts in iTunes as well but as I said the graphics chip worked OOB with the Dell Mini ISO. I also managed to get the AppleAzalia kext working while it is loaded from the EFI partition.

I’m very happy so far with the state of OS X on my NC10. It’s very usable. Minor annoyances are not being able to change the display brightness and the missing internal MIC + switch to headphone port.

Once you finish sanitizing your kext collection I’d be delighted to test your setup. Do you plan on writing a HOWTO on insanelymac? If you’re not I could be tempted as I think this is so cool that it definitely needs to be shared with the community. I’d obviously credit you with the success since you’ve been doing all the work.

I know it’s not going to be a HOWTO for everyone since installing from retail DVD requires at least a working network interface (e.g. USB-WLAN or exchanging the internal WLAN NIC – what we did) but I think there will be a lot of people who’d be very very grateful if there was a HOWTO.

BTW, obviously I’m writing this from OS X running on my NC10. Best value for money ever spent on PC hardware in my opinion.

I’ve just dumped the ALC262 codec data from an Ubuntu LiveUSB stick, so I’m going to try plugging this into HDA Enabler in order to try to get improved audio, and I’ve found the AppleDecrypt.kext I was looking for. I’m still planning to try adding some EFI strings too.

(I also re-wrote the AppleScript installer program from the Dell utility to be more fault-resilient and to remove a couple of mistakes – so I might repackage the installer to be NC10-specific with the latest bootloader, a working set of kexts, and any other updates I find).

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting the MacBook Air USB ethernet adapter from my local Apple Store, just to check that it works… and I’m sure it’ll come in handy at some point 😉

That’s good news! I hope you’ll get somewhere with the codec dump. Although I have not missed the headphone ports yet.

Well that sounds really good what you’re saying. It was already a fairly straightforward experience once I had it booting with the Dell Mini ISO but I’m sure if you could wrap it all up in a installer/script that would help out those without command line experience ;-).

Have you had any problems with bluetooth? Mine seems to be working sometimes. Before updating to 10.5.5 it used to be off after boot-up. Sending the NC10 to sleep and waking it up would enable bluetooth again. Now after the update to 10.5.5 it worked once fairly well (I even managed to establish a bluetooth PAN but with mediocre speed & latency) and now it shows “off” again…

Have you installed any tweak to make scrolling easier? I also noticed that tapping to click doesn’t work – which is probably a mac thing – I’ve never owned one before but I’m a convert now! 🙂

I’ve not had any problems with Bluetooth at all – other than that it’s not possible to disable it!

(Out of interest, does your NC10 have a 3G SIM slot in the battery bay?)

Scrolling is a pain because the hardware seems to have edge-acceleration turned on by default, and the Mac has no way to configure this. Tapping, however, is in the Keyboard and Mouse System Configuration applet, although it’s turned off by default.

Some bad news: I tried dropping the ALSA dump into HDA Enabler 1.20, and it just said “Unrecognised codec” 🙁

I’ve found a solution to my bluetooth problem (which was that bluetooth would show “off” after booting up when I paired my NC10 with any device). I downloaded a small command line utility called “blueutil” which allows to switch bluetooth on/off. Even though blueutil shows the bluetooth status as “on” when asked it enables the previously greyed out bluetooth icon when issued “blueutil on”.

My NC10 does not have the SIM card slot. When I opened it to replace the WLAN NIC i noticed the empty space on the mainboard for the mini PCI-E hsdpa card. It shouldn’t be too difficult to add one of these with a steady hand during soldering and the right molex connector for the card.

That’s indeed bad news about the codec. I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer as an idea since I’ve not even looked at the sound issue. Meanwhile my USB sound stick should arrive sometime so I can at least use skype with a headset when necessary.

Hi. Nice topic.
I tried the NC10 DVD created by Mysticus C.
He describes his solution @ http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=137314
He got just as far as you did except he almost has the audio working!
For the brightness problem i’m currently using ‘shades’ which doesn’t control the LED backlight but does help somewhat. http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades
I really hope someone will write a driver for it…
Are you experiencing any artifacts with the GMA950 driver? My screen occasionally gets somewhat jumbled, e.g. a cursor image where none should exist.

Hi Stuart,

I came across your blog after searching Google on how to install a retail copy of OS X on the NC10 as I dont particuarly like installing hacked version of software, espcially Operating Systems. Anyway, I was wondering if you could perhaps provide a quick how-to along with any files you used to get your retail copy installed? I realise this is a big ask but you seem to be the only person Ive come across installing OS X on the NC10 in the correct manner. I have OS X 10.5.4 on DVD and am a newbie to the whole hackintosh scene. Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I hope your mac is working out for you. Look forward to your reply.

Thanks!

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