I bought this little Netbook some time back now, it was an impulse buy and the goal was to have a small netbook to take around various sites to SSH into Server and for this it worked great. It came with 512MB ram (cheapest one with a proper HD) and I have installed Ubuntu, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 through it’s life. I thought I would give it a go at OSX – why not right?
Upgrading the RAM
Now the first thing I had to do of course was upgrade that RAM and I must point out you have to rip this thing apart just to get at the RAM, that’s a pretty bad design by any stretch and the board contained 512MB soldered on, so with only one slot, you can only get up to a max of 1.5GIG – pretty Lame. Had I know this info at the time, I would have stumped the extra cache and bought the 1GIG model. Anyhow, I installed 1GIG DDR2 Ram and this bumped it up to 1.5Gigs which helped the speed a great deal.
Installing OSX
I first tried iDeneb 1.5.1 which is a 10.5.7 distro, I had a problem with the keyboard in that 7’s would repeat and this made it impossible to type in a password or anything for that matter. I moved onto a Guide posted HERE which explains how to do this via iPC 10.5.6 distro and everything went well following that UNTIL I updated via the iDeneb 10.5.7 update and this meant I had to type “cpus=1” every single time, I could have easy fixed this but the next part killed it dead – I chucked in various Kext’s and was met with a white screen and a dead system in fact – moral here is do not go wild and chuck in any old kext or you will kill the system.
iDeneb 10.5.7 (1.5.1)
I was back to this again and worked out that I had to select the PS2 fix which made no sense but it helped and now the keyboard worked as well as the trackpad. I had a working 10.5.7 system at this point minus the wireless and it is known the wireless in the Acer One not to work fully, some have had a little success but mostly it is prone to failure. I tried the various fixes as listed and at one point had the wireless showing up but not connecting and upon reboot was met with a kernel panic.
Dell Wireless Card
With the Dell Desktop, I got a Dell 1505 Wireless N Card which came fitted into a PCI holder – now I had no need for this on my desktop (I connect via gigabit wired) but it would work a treat on the netbook. I ripped it apart once again (getting good at this now) and replaced the wireless and rebooted. Low and behold not only did the wireless light come on (which is new to me) but OS X Booted up. I checked and there was wireless symbol, it showed me all the wireless and I connected. We now had a fully functional Mac NetBook – something Apple has failed to provide as of yet.
Update to 10.5.8
I simply went to software update and updated – problem was, although the machine worked, the graphics were now 800×600 and no Quartz. After searching and finding various fixes, I found the 10.5.7 one and now had 1024×600 with Quartz, there was some slight graphical glitches but mostly it worked.
Working or not?
The end result is a Netbook Powered by an Atom 1.6Ghz with 1.5 GIG ram and Wireless N Networking running OS X 10.5.8 fully updated. It seem’s quite nippy and apart from the small screen size, can do everything a normal apple laptop could. Reason mainly for OSX was speed and just to see if it can be done.
