Come home. Drink two generous vodka & cokes whilst washing up & chatting to Caroline. Decide to “fix” one or two minor issues with the hackintosh.

Use Kext Helper to attempt to re-install some kernel extensions that I suspected hadn’t been installed properly. Reboot said hackintosh.

Experience the “no smoking” / grey boot screen. Experience extreme fear/rage/wish-that-one-had-got-time-machine-working-on-the-eee.

Spend rest of night figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.

In the end I had to bootstrap off the install cd I used for the original install, then boot into an iDebeb install image I had on a DVD, then use the terminal to copy back an original Extensions folder taken from my MacBookPro. Arse!

On the plus side, I think I now have a better understanding of what’s going on under the hood. On the minus side, it’s 3.38 in the morning, and I’m now back to where I started.

I’m using the original WiFi card in my eee, which does not have native out-of-the-box support from OS X.

Luckily, some third-party “drivers” are available from RALink, makers of the card.

The word drivers was in quotes in that last sentence because although this software allows use of the WiFi card, it doesn’t really supply a Mac OS X driver in the strictest sense of the word. A real driver would just invisibly do its job, allowing you to connect to wireless networks with the normal user interface - you wouldn’t really know that it was there.

The RALink software, in contrast, is rather painful, and a real eyesore. It consists of a custom application which you have to launch when you log in, and which opens a single window which you can’t resize or close.

This window has a tabbed interface with a great deal of random clutter on it that almost nobody will ever care about. The layout is a real dog’s dinner, and looks like it was probably created by a programmer who isn’t used to design visual UI of any kind, let alone for a Mac.

In amongst this is a list of the visible networks in range, and a (confusing) interface allowing you to join one. By default the software does not remember the password for a network, forcing you to re-enter it each time. However, there is a mechanism on a different tab which allows you to save “profiles”, which do save your password to a particular network. You can have multiple profiles, but only one is active at a given time, and you have to choose manually.

All in all, this software is a bit of a mess, but I suppose we should be grateful that it exists and that it has been made freely available. Personally I’d like to see RALink release it as open source - at the very least that would allow someone who knows what they are doing to clean up the UI.

In the meantime, I may upgrade my wireless card, just to get rid of this software. Which is a bit of a shame, since the built in card seems to actually work perfectly well.

After a few weeks playing with my eee 901 hackintosh, there’s no denying it, this machine is quite slow, and I seem to spend quite a bit of time watching the dreaded spinning rainbow. I’m running Leopard, and I’ve read various reports suggesting that Tiger is snappier, so I suppose that might be an option if you are prepared to go back to an earlier system (which I’m not).

In some cases the lack of performance seems slightly strange, and I wonder if there’s something a bit wrong at a driver or kernel level. Looking at Activity Monitor, the machine doesn’t often seem to be under major strain. I have two megs of ram, and have set virtual memory up to use the smaller, faster SSD partition, and it doesn’t look like there’s much paging going on. The SSD speed itself may be an issue, and I am planning to upgrade to a larger, faster drive at some point, so it will be interesting to see how that works.

Having said all this, it’s worth emphasizing that the machine is more than useable. A little bit of patience is required when starting or switching applications, and occasionally when a random stall occurs, but for the most part everything is fine - it’s not as if it struggles to keep up with my typing or anything like that.

Something occurred to me whilst I was setting up Apple Mail on my new Hackintosh.

It has an option to show plain text messages using a fixed width font. I have this set, but only because of the very occasional plain text message that uses tabs or spaces to line up items in multiple rows.

How about having a “smart” mode that attempts to spot this situation and use fixed width fonts only when necessary?

Off the top of my head I’d say that any mail containing a tab character or a run of two or more spaces (excluding the ends of lines), should trigger this mode.

Alternatively it could attempt to spot plain text formatting and actually convert it to formatted styled text. This would be trickier of course, but might allow it to do nice things like auto-converting common plain text idioms such as emphasis, underlining, bullet lists, and so on (I’m thinking of mark-up languages such as Markdown, or wiki-style formatting). I think Mail may actually do this already for emphasis, but it could be nice if it was expanded to cover other formatting.

My eee 901 is now running MacOS X 10.5.6.

Many thanks to the various people out on the web who’ve written up instructions and advice on how to achieve this. The main link I used was this one from Gregory Cohen.

It would be fair to say that the resulting Mac is not flawless - WiFi support is a bit clunky, and there a number of minor things that don’t work right by all accounts (although I’ve yet to encounter any major problems).

That said, this is the cheapest Mac I’ve ever had - and yet I would gladly have paid two or three times as much for a really well put together machine of a similar size, made by Apple. Hint hint.