I’ve been wanting a lightweight travel machine for ages. I’ve been looking longingly at the MacBook Air as several folks I know own one, but the price has always been too high for me to easily justify to myself. And with the recent price increase in Australia to AU$2899 base, I just couldn’t do it.
I also know several people with Asus Eee PCs. They swear by them. Most of them are running one form of Linux or another. I could cope with that, but am so comfortable in OS X that I dislike using anything else. Not that the OS should matter - most of my data is in the cloud.
What you’re looking at here is an Asus Eee PC 1000H running OS X. Best of both worlds!
Here’s what I’ve done to it:
- installed OS X 10.5.5 from iDeneb based on instructions at eNik
- upgraded the memory to 2Gb
- I will install an Airport card as, while it works, the onboard Broadcom card (and the app that goes with it) aren’t awesome
That’s Skype and Twhirl running there. I’ve also installed:
- Coda 1.5.1
- Firefox 3.0.3
- Git
- Keynote ‘08
- MAMP Pro
- Quicksilver
- SimplifyMedia
- TextMate
- VLC
- Vodafone Mobile Connect
- Vuze
There are some well-documented gotchas that are a minor inconvenience:
- Ethernet doesn’t work
- audio doesn’t work through speakers but works fine through USB
- the two video .kext files need to be installed after first boot into OS X
- CPU SpeedStep doesn’t work
- mapped controls on the keyboard no longer work and default to OS X standards
- the screen is at full brightness but can be controlled through this tool
The perfect cheap travel machine, no? And not expensive.
I’m more than happy to take the hit on engineering beauty and audio for a machine 1/3 the price of an Air.
Total cost, AU$848:
- Eee PC 1000H - AU$598
- 2Gb RAM - AU$75
- legitimate copy of OS X Leopard - AU$150
- Airport card - AU$25
- two hours of my time