OSX 10.6.1 SnowLeopard on the eee 1000HE – Part 1 (Updated)
This video is the first part of a two part video tutorials on how to install OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on the Asus EEE PC 1000HE.
This should work similarly for the other models of the eee family.
Watch part 2
The new install package can be downloaded here.
Update: New installation package
Fixed:
- Sleep should work now
- Brightness fix
- Bluetoth fix
- Ethernet fix
Existing users just replace /Extra folder with the new one.
Notes
Subscribe to the newsletter in order to get the latest news on drivers and compatibility.
USB boot problems
AFAIK, if you only get a blinking cursor (no boot0 or boot1 failed) then the boot0 file has not been correctly written.
Otherwise it is probably the boot1h file.
- Make sure that you are in the right directory.
Type “ls -l” and make sure that you have a bunch bootXX files in the list - Make sure that you got the right disk ID (you’ll need the one that has the capacity of your USB drive)
(and no, a 4GB stick will NOT work, but it was the only one lying around to illustrate the problem)
- Make sure you type : sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdiskXXX AND replace the XXX with the ID of your USB stick
Make sure that you type your password at this moment
There is no message after you do that (even if it fails) - Make sure you type: sudo dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdiskXXXs2 AND replace the XXX with the ID of your USB stick
There you should get a message on several lines saying something about “XXX bytes transferred….” - Make sure you have a file named boot in your root
- Check with “ls -l /” –> you must have a file named “boot” in this list
That should do it.
Post Installation problems
Wrong screen resolution, no sleep, … don’t panic:
- Open a terminal
- Type:
cd /Extra
mv Extensions.mkext Extensions_COPY.mkext
sudo ./eee-mkext-create.sh
- then type your password.
- Check that a new Extensions.mkext file has been created.
- Reboot
Wifi
There are two types of Wifi cards that are used to build the 1000HE:
- The NE766 : You’ll have to get the OSX drivers from the Ralink homepage
- The NE771 : It seems that this card is working out of the box (tested by Paolo)
I swapped my Wifi card just in the beginning for a compatible Airport device (Broadcom BCM 94321MC 802.11n), so unfortunately I cannot test this.
Graphics
Works
At the moment the brightness adjustment is not working.
I’m looking into this…
WARNING: Even though I don’t experience any problems, there are some reports that the graphics performance under SnowLeopard may be quite slow for some installs (around 30% of Leopard).
You can follow this topic here.
Ethernet
Working
At the moment the ethernet port is not working.
I’m looking into this…
Bluetooth
Working
Not tested
(8 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Hi, please help me. A have Asus EEE 1000H. And battery status not working. THX
I followed these directions and everything went according to plan. I really appreciate the geekiness that went into such an endeavor.My question is this: How do I dual boot with Win7? I’m a little unclear on the order of install and how to get OS X to boot using MBR.Any help is GREATLY appreciated!
I was wondering how different this would be to the eee pc 1000. I had replace the 32gb to a faster SSD so that is my main drive and I was wondering how well this will work once I have the correct DSDT. I have some experience with Dell Mini 9 and a MSI Wind, but never for an ASUS or Snow Leopard. Any direction would be grateful. Thanks.
First thanks for the great Tutorial, it works an my Eee PC 1005HA with Mac OS X 10.6.2 with patched kernel, full grapic, speedstep, brightness control etc. (WiFi works with a Broadcom BCM4311).
But now my sound is not working correctly, it is scratching extremly like a broken speaker, but under Mac OS X 10.5.7 und Windows it is working clearly without a problem. I got the same result, when I play the sound over the headphonejack.
I tryed several “voodoohda.kext” but without success. Got anybody another solution or the same problem.
Well, i got Mac OS 10.6.0 and an eeepc 1005HA.anybody knows if this will work?
RT @nhirt: OSX 10.6.1 SnowLeopard on the eee 1000HE – Part 1 (Updated) http://bit.ly/13VI4P
does anyone know what hardware differances there are or what i need to change to install this?
hi there, do you know if this will this work for Asus Eeepc 904HD???
The process probably will, but the install files will change with hardware differences.
No idea. You’ll have to do try and error. While most of the kexts should work the bios won’t (it’s specific to the model).
Nik
Thank you for the elaborate and well constructed guideI can confirm installing with a generic usbkey with 8gb(shows 7.4gb, but thats because vendors define gb differently than hardware people do! Look at wiki Kibibyte vs. Kilobyte for reference)Everything worked out of the box except wifi and external vga. I fixed wifi with the ralink utility+’drivers’Does anyone have external vga up and running?/henrik
@henrik: Yes, it just worked on its own. I didn’t have to do anything special. Have you done the 10.6.1 update? Maybe that was the special ingredient. Also, I would recommend the suggestion above under “post installation problems” as this seemed to solve a lot of issue automatically. Other than that, sorry I can’t help you.
External vga is slightly tricky. It only works for extended workspaces. As soon as you try to switch to mirrored mode the screen gets scrambled and it’s extremely difficult to get back.
Nik
I got it working after a few tries. For some reason my Asus 1000H has gotten a bit unreliable after me opening it a few times, modding and playing with the chassis.Don’t try to use mirror, it will result in vertical lines and default mirroring. You have to use the application MirrorDisplays to reverse it. (Google it).
Hi,Can anyone have feedbacks to share regarding the overall performance and the overall battery lifetime between 2 charge?- Can I expect the same battery lifetime compared to the WinXP stock install?- I wan’t to use my 1000HE to train on After Effects and I’m a bit surprised on how it responds (in low res of course) on WinXP then could I expects the same results with OSX ?Thanks.
I get right at 3 hrs of battery life on a full charge. (1000H) I don’t use after effects so I can’t comment on how well it functions.
Is there any way to update the BIOS to 1002 after installing Snow Leoprd on 1000HE 1GB ?Everything is working fine after installation, but I am getting message to “Shut down computer by holding down the power button” .
To be more specific, here is the error messagehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/bananasontoast/4029272626/
Mani- Looked at that pic and thats exactly what I get when I try booting from the SL USB stick created via this video?Tried creating the USB stick several times in-case I missed something. The only thing thats different for me was the DSDT file and my BIOS ver on my 1000HE (1104) The one supplied in the download is for 1002 BIOS.Anyone have some suggestions on getting past this issue for us?
<p>Sorry for double post. Can’t get carriage returns.</p><p>@Admin: Can you please provide a link to the article you referenced in
the last reply? Also, can you please provide any tips on what I can do
to troubleshoot the boot issue (SL-only system only able to boot from
USB) as I have followed the instructions and it still won’t work. Are
there any BIOS settings I have to look out for, for
instance?</p><p>@Anyone: I now have working Wifi so I am down to 3
issues and would appreciate any help that can be provided:</p><p>1)
Sleep – Does sleep work for anyone using a 1000HE? I can select Sleep
from the menu or close the lid and it sleeps (screen goes black and
power light stays on) but I cannot find a way to wake it up. For those
who have it working, did you apply any additional fixes (aside form
those provided in these instructions)to make it happen? What do you do
to wake it up? What keys are used?</p><p>2) Apple Key – When I
attach an external USB keyboard, the keys all seem to be correct, for
instance all function keys register and the Windows/command key takes
the place of the apple key in all key combos. The keyboard built into
the 1000HE, however, does not seem to register F14, F15 or the command
key correctly (command key looks like it registers 5 or 6 different
keystrokes at once). Has anyone had this problem or have any ideas how
I can fix it (without messing up the layout for the functioning
external keyboard)?</p><p>3) Power Down – When I shutdown the
system, OSX SL shuts down to a black screen but doesn’t power down (the
power light is still on and I have to hold the power button down for a
few seconds to power down completely). Is this what everyone else is
experiencing?</p><p>Any help on these issues is greatly appreciated
as I am so close. Thanks.</p>
Hi, I came across this and was well impressed. I’ve tried to have a go with my 8Gb Sandisk Cruzer micro. I created the image fine and the partition, however when I get to the restoring the image to the USB stick i get the following error message “Could not validate sizes – Operation not permitted”. Hoping someone might be able to shed some light for me. Thanks in advance.
Hi,
Have you tried another usb stick?
The strangest things have been reported, depending on some sticks.
Unfortunately there seems to be no pattern in the ones who work and the ones who don’t…
Keep us posted.
Nik
Nik,I just tried another usb stick and encountered the same problem. I noticed that when I format the drive in the disk utility it only recognises the drive as being about 7.4 – 7.5 Gb. Is this likely to be an issue?
@Massergot to: http://www.ralinktech.com/support.php?s=3download the one with RT2870 in the title.when you open it, there won’t be a file for 10.6, just use the one for 10.5you should be good from there.
@GatorGolfer: Thanks for the tip. I suspected that it might go by another model but was afraid to try. I gave the RT2870 (which seems to only have USB drivers) and the one down the list for RT2860 (which is PCI). The second one did the trick. I really appreciate the lead. Thank you. Can you provide any tips on my other two issues, relating to Dual-Boot and Sleep mode? One more side note on the boot issue. When I went into System Preferences > Startup Disk and tried to select the drive that has SL on it, it said “the the bless tool cannot set this boot drive” or something to that effect and wouldn’t set it. I’m going to try my luck with gparted and try to set the partition to active and see if that helps. Any other thoughts?
Nope. Setting the partition to active in gparted didn’t help. I still arrived at the blinking cursor when booting to the hard drive and when booting from the USB, the partition was no longer even in the boot list. I set it back to inactive and I’m back where I began (able to boot only using the USB stick). I wish I could figure out how this boot business works. In a perfect world, my goal was to take an existing 1000HE setup (with 4 partitions — 1 for windows XP, one for data drive D:, 1 for recovery files and 1 for EFI), delete the second partition and replace it with a SL partition (HFS+, GUID?) When I tried exactly that, Disk Utility wouldn’t allow me to make changes (+ or -) to any partitions without blowing away everything. I tried using gparted to make an HFS+ partition of the unallocated space which worked but OSX Install saw it as an invalid drive for install. I tried repairing and erasing the partition and nothing helped to change that. In order to make progress, I went ahead with creating a brand new partition in Disk Utility (blowing away the existing 4) and I can install SL with no major issues, aside from the boot and sleep issues described. Is it possible to do a dual boot with XP and SL, installing XP first (this has to be because I have to use the recovery Asus DVD to rebuild the whole XP installation)? Has anyone had luck with this?
Hi,
I’m on my iPhone, so just a quick reply.
Unfortunately your partitioning problems are normal…
There are a lot of discussions around here about that.
In short:
GUID does NOT work with XP (only MBR does)
in order to install OSX to an MBR partition you’ll need to modify a package on the installer USB stick.
If you system does not boot without the stick, you didn’t correctly write the boot files to the disk ( the existence of th file ‘boot’ at the root is not sufficient. You’ll have to write the MBR and the bootsector as describe in the second part of the tutorial.
If you do the modification (quite simple) to install to MBR, then you can follow the beginning of my older totorial for installing 10.5.x on this site, which explains just that (XP and OSX dualbooting).
If this doesn’t help I’ll try to be more precise on Monday on a real keyboard
cheers,
Nik
@Admin: Thank you. That sort of makes sense but I’d appreciate any additional details on the modifications required or a pointer to the article. As for the boot of my current setup (with only SL), I have followed the instructions to the letter I think, in terms of both creating the bootable USB stick and post-installation. I didn’t get any errors when I ran the terminal commands provided in the second readme so it seems to have gone well but it just won’t seem to boot (or get past the blinking cursor). Is there anything that I can do to isolate or troubleshoot further? Also, any suggestions for the fact that I can’t wake up from sleep? Is there a special wake key? Thanks again.
@Admin: Can you please provide a link to the article you referenced in the last reply? Also, can you please provide any tips on what I can do to troubleshoot the boot issue (SL-only system only able to boot from USB) as I have followed the instructions and it still won’t work. Are there any BIOS settings I have to look out for, for instance?<br>@Anyone: I now have working Wifi so I am down to 3 issues and would appreciate any help that can be provided:<br>1) Sleep – Does sleep work for anyone using a 1000HE? I can select Sleep from the menu or close the lid and it sleeps (screen goes black and power light stays on) but I cannot find a way to wake it up. For those who have it working, did you apply any additional fixes (aside form those provided in these instructions)to make it happen? What do you do to wake it up? What keys are used?<br>2) Apple Key – When I attach an external USB keyboard, the keys all seem to be correct, for instance all function keys register and the Windows/command key takes the place of the apple key in all key combos. The keyboard built into the 1000HE, however, does not seem to register F14, F15 or the command key correctly (command key looks like it registers 5 or 6 different keystrokes at once). Has anyone had this problem or have any ideas how I can fix it (without messing up the layout for the functioning external keyboard)?<br>3) Power Down – When I shutdown the system, OSX SL shuts down to a black screen but doesn’t power down (the power light is still on and I have to hold the power button down for a few seconds to power down completely). Is this what everyone else is experiencing?<br>Any help on these issues is greatly appreciated as I am so close. Thanks.
@Admin: You mentioned that you could provide more details on Monday. Can you please point me in the right direction for the required modifications to get SL installing on MBR? I’d really appreciate your help. Also, I think my sleep-related questions are more pressing right now so any help you can provide to get sleep/wake to work would be a major help. I just realized that it doesn’t even report battery power level correctly, so I’m likely having a general, power-related challenge. Have others (yourself included) gotten SL to sleep correctly on an Asus 1000HE? Thanks.
By following your install guide, I was able to get os x 10.6.1 running beautifully on my 1000h. I have only found one issue. If I have the volume muted, and i put the computer to sleep, the volume will no longer be muted when it wakes(even though the volume icon in the task bar shows that it is muted). In order to “re-mute,” I must raise the volume and then I can hit the mute key. I use Spark to enable the volume hotkeys, but I don’t think this is the source of the problem because as I mention above the task bar icon shows mute status. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this or is this a rare problem?
Thank you very much for publishing this tutorial. I have found it incredibly helpful and have gotten further than I thought possible with Snow Leopard. I have only 3 outstanding issues that I can really use your help with:1) WIFI – I have the NE766 WIFI card and the tut above mentions getting drivers from the Ralink site. I don’t see any Mac drivers on their site for that specific model. Does it go by another model number? Can you please provide a link?2) Boot – I followed the tutorial to the letter as well as all post installation instructions (including the one under “USB Boot Problems”) and I see a “boot” file at the root so I can’t understand why it doesn’t boot right. I still cannot boot without use of my USB stick. When booting to the HD, I get the black screen and blinking cursor. I even set my IDE to compatibility mode in BIOS which had no effect. Is there anything else I can try?3) Sleep – When I choose to “sleep” the system or close my lid, the system goes black (power stays lit) and I am unable to bring it back without powering down and restarting. Is there a magic key combo to bring it out of sleep (I’ve tried space, mouse click, ALT+F3, power button)? If any of those should work, is there a suggested fix, not mentioned here?
Hello,I’ve installed snow leopard 10.6.1 successfully on a 1000H Bios 2003 the only thing I experience is display resolution problems. 1024*768 will ‘cut’ off the lower part of the screen en 800*600 you get a black strip on te right side of the screen. Other options just don’t work. Does anyone know the solution for this.Thanks!
Have you used Apple Update to update to 10.6.1 yet? If not, please do (yes, normal apple update in OSX). This solved my resolution issues. If this doesn’t work, try the solution above under Post Installation Problems (beginning with “cd /Extra”). This made my sound work.
Sorry, I didn’t read it right. You already have 10.6.1. Try the extensions.mkext file thing that I suggested then if you haven’t already.
I tried that to and it indeed worked for all other issues. The screen resolution of the 1000H is 1024*600 so you can’t see the lowest/last 168px on the bottom of the screen. If there is a way to adjust the display to 1024*600 it would be solved. Thanks for the reply btw!
That’s really weird. Once I completed the installation of 10.6, I was in 800×600 but after completing 10.6.1, I was immediately put into 1024×600. I didn’t have to do a thing — it just found it. I’m on a 1000HE, however, but I’m aware of any differences in the procedure from my reading. Sorry I couldn’t help.
Has any one had any luck with this on a eeepc 901? Will I have to make my own DSDT?Thanks
Thanks for your great tutorial! Everything works but wi-fi. I have the Atheros5007EG netbook version. I am going to buy and replace a compatible wireless card to get 100% working device. Great job! Sorry for my English.
Finally, I bought Broadcom BCM94311MCG card and replaced my stock Atheros. System recognized this card immediately. Now wi-fi works and I am happy!
i have been trying to build the usb key that you instructed and every time i have a problem, im not sure if im missing something, i can rip in the sl dvd just fine, i can format the usb just fine, but when i go to restore it gives me a possible image invalid error if i have the erase checkbox clicked, if i dont, its fine, any ideas to the solution, i am using a 16gb flash drive if that has anything to do with it.
i thought i would embelish, i have created the dmg on my mac osx 10.5.7 hackintosh which i intend to install on, i used an external dvd drive samsung, and then i also tried again thinking i didnt quite format the usb correctly but i got the error again, the error i got was:Restore FailureCould not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned/scanned for restoreI have tried to create the dmg 3 times now, im thinking that something might be wrong with my drive or my mac but im not sure which to look at first, i do not have any other machines running osx at the moment nor do i have any more external dvd drives.
I encountered same issue twice, I was using a generic 8GB
USB drive.
Then I changed to 8GB sandisk SDHC card, it worked fine.
well i have tried now with a 8gb micro sdhc san disk with class 4 speed and i still get the same error anyone have a specific drive/sd card that works for sure that i should get to get this thing going?