Jan 29 2009
Definitive Mac OS X installation guide for netbooks
There is currently a great demand for laptops which provide the user-friendliness of a Mac without the cost and weight of a MacBook or MacBook Pro, or without the cost of size of a MacBook Air.
Given that the ever-increasing varieties of Intel Atom-based netbooks are low-cost and roughly equivalent in hardware terms to the original MacBook Air, they make a tempting target to conversions to “MacBook Mini”s.
Indeed, there are a large (and also increasing) number of guides which will tell you how to get OS X running using a variety of ISO images downloaded via BitTorrent and hacked kernels which then require extensive changes to the installed system and come with copious warnings not to upgrade the OS when Software Updater prompts you to… and even then it’s common for basic functions such as sleep or USB not to work (although it has to be said that no method is entirely free from caveats).
This guide doesn’t work like that. This guide will describe how to install OS X from an original Leopard installation DVD and how to end up with an entirely unmodified system (*) which will not break when Apple issues updates.
DISCLAIMER: Please do not attempt anything you read about below without understanding what you're doing! Following these instructions will erase your hard drive before Leopard is installed, so only continue if you're happy with this and have backups. This guide is written from memory, and I haven't wiped my netbook to confirm every step - although I'm happy to receive feedback about any errors.
This guide is written with the Samsung NC10 in mind, for this is the only netbook I have available to test with. Other netbooks should also work with the same method, but I’ll post updates if I hear of any problems or improvements. This guide does not cover multi-boot systems, although it should be relatively easily achievable for anyone with a working knowledge of boot-loaders.
- What you will need:
-
- An Intel Atom-based netbook with the ability to boot from USB devices;
- A USB data stick or USB hard disc to boot from with 64Mb of free space;
- A USB DVD drive or, alternatively, a 16Gb or larger USB data stick or USB hard disc from which to install Leopard and access to a machine with a DVD drive already running OS X. 1
Some people have reported problems in getting external DVD drives to be recognised, so the current best advice is to image the Leopard DVD onto a USB hard disc, as described below, and install from this; - An OS X-supported WiFi MiniPCI-e card, an OS X-supported internal ethernet adapter, or an Apple MacBook Air USB to Ethernet adapter (or similar);2
- Access to a machine running Windows to start with (although this can be the netbook itself prior to OS X installation, or alternatively a Linux machine);
- A basic knowledge of UNIX command-lines is helpful, but not required.
1 Most (all?) netbooks do not feature an optical drive, so installing Leopard isn’t as simple as just dropping the DVD into a DVD drive… unless you happen to have one handy. If you don’t, then all is not lost – if you have access to another machine running OS X which also has a DVD drive, then you can simply insert the Leopard installation DVD and connect your removable media and launch Disk Utility. Click on the DVD icon on the left and then select the “Restore” tab. Now drag the DVD icon onto the “Source” text-box and your USB hard disc or data stick onto the “Destination” text-box and click “Restore”. Note that the Leopard DVD image is just slightly too large to fit onto an 8Gb data stick 🙁
2 This is probably the greatest hurdle to getting Leopard running on the NC10 in particular, as it is unlucky enough to have both wireless and ethernet adapters which aren’t supported as standard on OS X. If an install is attempted on a stock machine without a USB ethernet adapter, then the first stage will succeed but the user-creation stage will loop endlessly because the OS can’t find a network adapter. It is possible to avoid this by configuring a Bluetooth PAN connection, but since this doesn’t have an ethernet MAC address other problems (and lots of log messages concerning UUIDs) will result.
It is actually possible to get the stock wireless adapter running, but this is a complex process and the result is not stable, so I won’t cover it here. The ethernet adapter is currently a non-starter, with no support in OS X at all. Thus, whilst it is possible to get by with a USB network adapter, by far the best solution is to crack open the chassis and replace the standard MiniPCI-e WiFi card with a Broadcom replacement – Dell TrueMobile cards seem to be the popular choice. I opted for the 802.11BG Dell 1395 over the 802.11ABG Dell 1490 on the assumption that the lack of 802.11A networking, something I’ve never come across in the UK, might lead to some power savings. 802.11N cards also work, but check around first to ensure that there are no hardware incompatibilities with OS X.
- What you will need to download:
- This bit’s easy – you only need a single file: The installation image available from here (8.6Mb), which now includes the Windows syslinux binary, used to make your USB data stick or disc drive bootable. If you need to install from an OS other than Windows, the latest release of syslinux is available from here (but you won’t need this if you do have a Windows machine available to prepare the USB boot data stick).
- What will happen next:
- Firstly we’re going to copy the installation files, which are actually only just over 45Mb in size, to the USB data stick or hard disc. Then syslinux is run from Windows or Linux in order to make the device bootable. Booting from this device allows the Leopard installation to complete. After this, we’ll run a script which automagically performs the system changes necessary to boot without the USB device in place, and… that’s it!
- Preparing the boot device:
- If necessary, start by (re)formatting your USB data stick or disc drive as FAT32. Extract the installation image Zip file, downloaded above, and copy all of the files contained within to the root of the USB device (so that “BOOT“, “BOOT.CAT“, etc. are at the top level of the USB device – not in any subdirectory). Now open a Command Prompt and change directory to your USB device – for example, drive U:. Now run the command:
U:\syslinux -ma U:… to make the drive (U: in this example) bootable.
Note that this command shouldn’t produce any output: if anything appears on-screen, then the process has failed. This can be caused by supplying the wrong drive-letter, or by not running the command with elevated privileges on Windows Vista or Windows 7. In this latter case, “CMD” should be typed into the Start Menu search box and then the ‘CMD’ icon above should be right-clicked and “Run as administrator” should be chosen.
At the very next step, we will be reformatting the drive for use with Leopard – so now would be an excellent time to backup your Windows partition(s), or even swap out the internal hard disc (and wireless). I took the latter approach, and installed a 30Gb OCZ Core Series v2 SSD. The capacity is plenty for my needs (even with a full Xcode install, I still have almost 10Gb of space free) and has the benefits of being totally silent, having no moving parts, consuming less power, and actually performing better than the drive installed as standard!
- Installing Leopard:
- Reboot your netbook with the USB device inserted and enter the BIOS Setup (probably by pressing Escape, F2, or Delete as the machine powers on) and ensure that the following options, if available, are enabled:
- NX / XD / EDB
- HPET
… and also ensure that you change the boot order to place the USB drive before the internal disc drive. The NC10 has two USB sockets on the left and one on the right, and it simplified things greatly to place the bootable USB device in the right-hand socket with the USB DVD drive or larger-capacity USB device on the left.
Now hold your breath, cross your fingers, and allow the system to start to begin installing Leopard!
… almost. First you should see a simple text-mode boot menu where you have to press Enter to confirm booting from the DVD (image). As noted above, the most reliable installation method is currently to boot an image of the Leopard DVD from a USB hard disc (or large USB data stick).
You should now be looking at the Leopard installer’s language select screen. Please email me with details if this isn’t the case. Note that the screen will look strange at this stage, because 800×600 output is being stretched onto a 1024×600 screen.
Instead of proceeding with installation as normal, select your language and then select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Choose your internal drive from the list on the left, and then select the Partition tab. Define a single partition covering the entire device, but before applying hit the Options button to pull up the dialog below:
… from where the GUID Partition Table option should be selected. Now continue to select the file system to use and format the newly-created partition. Users of SSD’s should avoid the “Journalled” option (as it will needlessly generate addition wear on the device) and the “Case-sensitive” option, whilst technically correct, should be avoided if planning to run Adobe applications at any point in the future – because Adobe’s inability to consistently use either upper- or lower-case results in breakage when the file system differentiates between the two.
Now, finally, proceed through the installation as normal – being sure to deselect options, such as printer drivers, which would consume a large amount of disk space if space is at a premium such as with an SSD.
Installation should continue successfully until the very last stage when the installer tries to set the partition with the newly-installed OS as the boot volume – which will fail since this is not a real Mac. This is completely normal. Remove the installation DVD but keep the USB boot device inserted and reboot.
- Creating the EFI partition:
- The last stage of this installation method will reformat the 200Mb EFI partition, which is currently otherwise unused (but which the EFI standards say must be formatted as FAT32) as HFS+ to form an alternative boot partition for OS X. Modified override kernel extensions can then be loaded from here before the actual system extensions are seen, allowing Leopard to work transparently on foreign hardware.
You should be looking at the Leopard desktop, and have a drive icon for the bootable USB drive. In here should be a disk image named ‘MacOS Installer.dmg’: open this, and there should be a variety of items including a script named “Installer”. Run this and follow the prompts (the default answers should be sensible) in order to setup your EFI partition.
- Important Note:
-
It has just been brought to my attention that versions of the NC10 with integrated 3G modems have (slightly) different DSDTs to the non-3G models. Therefore, if you have the 3G NC10 then please do not choose to install a DSDT override when prompted by the Installer. There is now a replacement DSDT.aml for 3G editions – if you wish to install the DSDT override then either copy this in to place on your EFI partition manually, or drag it into the mounted ‘MacOS Installer.dmg’ disk-image before running the “Installer” script.
I accidentally wiped out my (real) MacBook Pro when testing the installer, but it did seem that for some reason the /Volumes/EFI/Extensions/ directory had been created, but that the contents of the Extensions directory from the installer image hadn’t been copied across. It’s worth choosing not to reboot, and double-checking that this has succeeded before restarting. It’s best to copy the files across from a Terminal session, and then run /Volumes/EFI/update.sh as root once they are in place. Again, please let me know if this works for you or not.The Version 1.1 update has now been tested on a variety of hardware, and the correct files are being created. The glitch above must have been related to accidentally running the installer on a real Mac. Don’t do it, kids 😉
If the version of Leopard installed isn’t 10.5.6, it would be worthwhile to now apply the 10.5.6 Combo update, as the extensions supplied with the Installer are the 10.5.6 versions, and may not work as expected on earlier releases.
This update can be downloaded from Apple’s Downloads site.
Eject the Installer image and the USB device, and then reboot for the final time (note that you will not see an Apple logo as the system boots from now on – this was removed from the bootloader for code-size reasons), and you should find that you have an all-singing, all-dancing, and mostly functional Leopard machine in front of you! 😀
- Where do we go from here?:
- There are still issues related to running external displays over the VGA port in non-mirrored mode which are unresolved. Audio switching from the headphone jack to the internal speakers is currently a manual job, but forthcoming drivers due soon promise to fix this. Because the touchpad is assumed to be square, the vertical sensitivity is too high, but this is also being worked on. Finally, scripts are needed to change the brightness level as this can’t be done with the function keys. And yes, the Euro key on Fn+F3 really does output “0128” instead of anything useful <sigh>.
At the time of writing, none of the SMBIOS replacement extensions work on 10.5.6, so correcting the System Profiler output is not currently possible. Finally, Intel’s EIST is currently unsupported, and extensions which enable this on other Intel processors crash the Atom. Given that the processor’s TDP is a measly 2.5W this isn’t really the big issue it would be on other more powerful systems.
Note that, after going to all of this trouble to get Leopard installed without modifying the installed copy in any way, it’s important to resist the temptation to then go and install any extensions onto the system partition itself – and ignore any instructions which direct you to do so! Any new extensions should be installed instead into the Extensions directory on the EFI partition, and the update.sh script in the root of this partition must be run after any change.
Two excellent tips from the ever-useful MacOSXHints.com are:
- Disable Safe Sleep, aka Hibernation – which doesn’t work with the current version of efi_boot, although support is already working in other bootloaders and is promised for the next release of Chameleon. Once Safe Sleep is disabled, /var/vm/sleepimage can be removed to reclaim some disk space.
- Enable remote DVD mounting allows any machine to use 10.5’s new MacBook Air feature of making remote DVD drives appear local for software installation purposes.
Apple updates should all be fine, although Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), being 64bit (and the Atom N270 being 32bit only), is an unknown quantity. There are currently rumours of an Atom-based Mac Mini update or even an official Apple netbook, either of which could vastly improve the, already very good, hardware support for this platform.
If/when Apple to release further Mac OS updates, or when upgrading to 10.5.6 initially, it’s well worth making a (Time Machine?) backups first. I’d then advise downloading the Combo Update from Apple’s support site rather than installing the Delta update offered through Software Update. It’s well known that running “Verify Disk Permissions” can throw back warnings after installing a Delta update, whilst this doesn’t happen after applying a (more comprehensive) Combo update.
- Update:
- Version 1.1 of the installer fixes several problems, including preventing the Quiet boot plist from being given the wrong name and fixing the location of the log files which are created during the install. Anyone who has already downloaded the original release should upgrade to this version and re-run the installer if any problems were encountered previously.
* Almost 😉
5th May 2009 @ 6:09 pm
John, I think that’s a known problem with the current VoodooPS2 beta… that’s why I’m waiting for the full release 😀
Marcos, It sounds like Windows overwrote the MBR boot-loader when it installed – which it always does, to be fair. Luckily, it will happily boot with the boot-loader in the header of it’s partition with a different MBR boot-loader, so feel free to install GrUB, Chameleon, or anything else which works onto the MBR, and you should be able to multi-boot any OS (… although note that I’ve not tried this myself). Chameleon does seem a good choice, though – it should auto-detect drives and do-the-right-thing(tm).
In terms of the blued problem, you’re right – if multiple people are affected (especially on hardware that works correctly under Windows) then it’s highly unlikely to be hardware-related. Having not seen the problem myself, though, it’s hard to comment. Did the problem suddenly appear at some point, or has it always happened on this install? Did it happen on any previous install? Does the state of the BT adapter (enabled or disabled) make any difference?
eblot mentioned that his started malfunctioning after the installation of a Software Update – but since there were no new ones at the time, I assume that this was just bringing that machine up to date. My machine says that it is fully updated, so there’s nothing obvious there, either.
It’s sort of a desperate suggestion, but given the lack of anything more constructive I’d suggest running a Filesystem Check and a Permissions Repair on the system drive from Disk Utility, and also to re-run ‘update.sh’ on the EFI partition. At least if this doesn’t fix things then we’ll at least know where we stand.
5th May 2009 @ 6:53 pm
stuart, many thanks for this guide! working almost perfectly.
only small problem that the machine does not wake up after sleep. havent installed any extra extensions besides the ones that are included in your package. any ideas where to start?
havent still had the chance to try the vga. but will be happy even without mirrormode…
you mentioned that you were going to post your script for changing the brightness? is that still on? or perhaps there is a good one someone could point me to.
cheers
5th May 2009 @ 7:44 pm
Stuart> It’s possible that you’ve got a bad DIMM there
I thought about this option at first, but I don’t think it matches the symptoms: I’ve disabled the com.apple.blued launchd script, so blued does not start up automatically at boottime [using Lingon tool]. I then tried to launch blued (sudo /usr/sbin/blued) from a Terminal, at various times after the NC10 boot up sequence (some seconds, some minutes, even hours). Many apps have been launched in the meantime, with no noticeable issues nor crashes. It is very unlikely the blued daemon got loaded at the same physical address in these conditions, but it nevertheless crashed every time. Marcos, how much memory have you mounted on your NC10?
As a side note, the Touchpad prefpane finally appeared (and is now always available). I’m not sure what triggered its appearance, but it’s one of the following actions:
* plug in or plug out the power DC while the NC10 lid is closed and in sleep mode
* plug in or plug out the stereo output jack within the same condition
(note that I had removed the “matching” XML tags as documented, and power cycled many times prior to execute these actions)
It’s is more likely that the first action triggered it, as I can’t see a relationship between the prefpane and the audio jack.
BTW, I cannot get the audio output jack to work: is there anything to change to get it working?
5th May 2009 @ 8:02 pm
eblot I had the same problem with the Trackpad icon randomly appearing at some point – I didn’t really think much more about it!
I think we need more information to further diagnose the blued issues… which I’m still not seeing (thank goodness) on my machine.
To switch to the Headphone jack, you need CHUD from Apple’s Developer Tools/Xcode installed – this is on the installation DVD or downloadable from developer.apple.com and also the NC10-specific version of Audieee, available from my downloads page.
sakalli, you need to disable Safe Sleep – as detailed towards the end of the guide above (via a link to MacOSXHInts.com). This is currently needed even with Chameleon, because its wake-from-hibernation support is still not yet working correctly.
6th May 2009 @ 3:32 am
that did the trick. thank you!
6th May 2009 @ 9:55 am
eblot/stuart
Can I refer you to the BIke Town forum post on this, which I’ve just updated.
http://mysticus.titanous.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=213&p=1277#p1277
Much as I appreciate Stuart’s blog, I think the forum is a better place for this kind of thing.
7th May 2009 @ 12:24 am
Hi Stuart…I’m giving more thought to a dual boot configuration and want to run an idea by you. I also understand that this idea might undermine the EFI partition design you’ve created, but you’ve stated you’re willing to help, so here goes. The idea I have could be pretty clever if it works.
Let me start first with stating exactly where I am in my configuration. Presently the NC10 has a dual partitioned hard drive with a install of XP Home on the first NTFS partition. That partition is sized at 50 MB. The second partition is FAT32 and is blank and is around 100MB. The XP installs boots and works perfectly. I used Easus Partion Master 3.5 to set up the partition schemes. The NTFS partition is Primary and the FAT32 is Logical. Note that before I do any more installs this setup could be changed to add a third partition or resize the current ones.
On an external, note external, Samsung USB powered 320 GB hard drive, GUID formatted, is the clone of Leopard created using your EFI method. This install was cloned from the NC10 when I had originally installed it as a GUID single partitioned install along with your EFI modified partition. Using the BIOS setting, it can boot normally and fully functionally off of the external hard drive and operate as it would if it were an internally installed OS. In other words, I have a dual boot machine with your EFI method working, except XP and Leopard are on two separate hard drives.
The idea I have is to somehow clone that Leopard installation from the external USB hard drive on the the blank second partition on the Samsung. I’ve tried it before using the original modified 8 GB thumbdrive Leopard installer and using the USB thumb drive bootloader, I’m able to boot into your original modified Leopard installer and then use it’s Disk Utility to format that second partition on the Samsung to MacOS Extended (Journaled) After the format, I again use Disk Utility to “Restore” the installation of the external HD to the second partition on the Samsung. That restore goes without a hitch.
After the restore finished, I rebooted, and the BIOS in the Samsung sees both Leopard and XP. When I selected Leopard, it would boot, but only appearing like the install was before adding the EFI extensions. I’m assuming this type of install has negated the functionality of your EFI method, since we’re no longer GUID formatted. What I’m wondering is if there is a way to manually install the kexts I would need to bring it back up to it’s full functionality as originally working via EFI. That’s one part of the issue and here’s the next.
Let’s reboot and now select the XP install to boot up. It won’t boot normally, but hangs at the “calling chainbooter” Only a manual restart will get me out of that screen and so I’m stuck with only being able to boot the unmodified Leopard. XP is seemingly completely unavailable to boot into, but it’s there on that first partition.
I’ve figured out how to get XP booting again, but it requires reformatting that second partition using the Samsung XP install disk. I just proceed as if doing a new install of XP, select “quick” NTFS format on that second partition. Once it’s formatted, I’ll stop the install, reboot, and then XP will again boot up normally. Leopard is completely gone at this point.
I feel like I’m close to something here, but feel like I’m chasing my tail. Do you have any idea whatsoever what I could do to make this idea work better. Do I need to somehow manually create an EFI partition as a third partition?
The Leopard install I’m cloning over from the external HD is over 28GB and is working beautifully. I don’t want to reinstall from scratch unless I have to but I will if necessary.
Hopefully I’ve made this issue make sense. Would you please share any thoughts on this concept with me, please. If somehow I need to re-modify the Leopard installer, I’ve got an 8 and 16 GB USB thumb drive to also work with.
Thanks
Larry
7th May 2009 @ 9:08 pm
Hi,
I saw that there is a successor of the Samsung NC10, the N110. It’s a tad faster but still cheap. What do you reckon? Could I buy that one and still create a nice Hackintosh out of it?
Or should I stick with the good ole NC10? Thanx for your help and your great work.
Kind regards, Yawg.
7th May 2009 @ 11:26 pm
Yawg, so far as I’m aware the N110 is pretty much identical to the NC10, hardware-wise – which the exception of a higher-capacity battery. It’s exactly the same N270 processor at the same speed: The N110 isn’t an N280-based machine.
(The N280 is broadly identical to the N270, but runs on a faster 667MHz bus as opposed to the 533MHz bus of the former)
As I think I’ve mentioned before, having a squarer-ratio Trackpad is a bonus for tracking speeds with the standard PS2 drivers. Processor, memory, and hardware is apparently identical. I’m not really a fan of the red line around the machine – but the kicker for me is the screen: From what I hear the N110 has a glossy reflective screen. I hate these things. For that reason alone I’d personally stick with the NC10.
As always, you pays your money, you makes your choice.
9th May 2009 @ 4:22 pm
just wondering. Is there a way to properly resize the iphone simulator so that it fits the screen and the controls aren’t off? i modified your line above in the 2nd post about the appleDisplayScaleFactor to modify the com.apple.iphonesimulator.plist and it resizes it but the control is off.
also, i ran your script to mount the efi partition but when i try to access the extensions folder on the partition, it says that i do not have sufficient access privileges. what is the problem here?