Zlaxfish Network

The goal of getting this Acer Aspire One was to create, in essence, a Macbook Mini that would be light, fit my daily needs at work and class, and have great battery power.  While I love my Macbook Pro, I can’t deny the battery issues…in one year of ownership, the battery capacity has dropped to 50%, giving me barely a 1:45 hour runtime with lowest power settings.  Also, lugging it around all the time with books can’t be good for my back.

Enough blabbing, onto the install!

Basically, I followed the instructions provided by the geniuses on aspireoneuser forums: click here

Here are my notes on that install.

I decided not to use an external dvd drive, and instead used my 4GB USB drive.  There are instructions here for preparing your flash drive and putting the install image on it. NOTE: The diskpart step I could only get to work in Vista as in 2003 and XP, it couldn’t see the drive’s partition when setting it active.

I would follow the instructions for the majority of the install, but I definitely recommend using the Voodoo kernel.  While it means you can’t use Software Update for OS updates, 10.5.6 isn’t a huge change over 10.5.5, so I wasn’t concerned.  Voodoo will be releasing updates soon to make this possible anyway, so I determined the performance jump of having hyperthreading and not having to set a boot flag was the way to go.  Also, note that sometimes the progress bar appeared stuck, don’t worry, it’s moving, for some odd reason it doesn’t always show!

As for the wireless card, there are some flakey ways to get it working, but instead, I got a cheap Dell 1390 PCI Express card off of eBay and put it in following this walkthrough.  While I was in there, I bumped the RAM to 1.5GB.  One thing I will note is that you don’t need to freak out too much about the keyboard, if you pop the pins in too far with a screwdriver, you just have to pop them back into the slots from the back of the case top.

From there, you have a well-working copy of OS X.  I’ll provide some more tweaks and steps to do them soon!

Sleep does not work and due to the nature of having to reverse engineer video drivers in the kernel, the current conensus on the aspireoneuser forums is that it is not a priority..

About This Mac and Airport working:

Hyperthreading isn’t dual-core but it does speed things up: