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.

Since I’m in the process of turning my eee 901 into a hackintosh, I was interested in this…

http://lifehacker.com/5146174/hackintoshes-possibly-more-popular-than-linux

I doubt the numbers personally, but it would be funny if it were true :)

Last week I bought an eee 901.

This is a fairly major departure for me - the last time I bought a non-Apple computer was about 1987 (an Amstrad CPC 128).

I already have a 15” MacBookPro supplied by work, but that tends to stay at home, tethered to an external monitor, keyboard, and external usb drive used for Time Machine.

I do occasionally move my MacBook round the house, but I’ve started to realise that increasingly I can’t be bothered (unmounting the usb drive is a particular pain since it often involves waking the machine up and entering a password just so that I can put it to sleep again). I also rarely leave the house with it. It is too large to fit into my normal bag, and quite heavy anyway. All of this is in marked contrast to my old aluminium 12” G4 powerbook, which used to go everywhere with me.

So basically I was in the market for something small, rugged, and not too pricey - in other words a netbook. I am a Mac programmer and fan of course, but Apple don’t make netbooks. Bugger!

So I started looking into going down the Hackintosh route - ie get a generic PC and hack it to run MacOS X (or rather, hack MacOS X to run on it).

I also realised that these days I rarely have time for much in the way of hobby programming, and a lot of what I would do if I had the time would be Python/Django based. Other than that, what I wanted this machine for was note taking, surfing, and that’s about it. So actually the need for a Mac suddenly seemed a bit more remote.

Hence the choice of an eee 901. Its small, I’ve got a solid-state drive so its rugged, it came with Linux installed so I didn’t have to pay anything for a copy of Windows that I’d never used - and a lot of people already have experience hacking it to hell, including running MacOS X.

So far I’ve only had it for a few days, so these are very initial thoughts:

Size

Its small, and pretty light. At first I thought it was feather-light, then I realised that the battery is disconnected when it ships. Lifting up the battery I realised that it weighs about as much as the rest of the machine!

Keyboard

The keyboard is very useable. Yes it is small, but even my fat fingers can cope quite well. I wouldn’t want to write a novel on it, and I’ve made quite a few mistakes typing this.

Once you’ve spent enough time trying to type on an iPhone, the eee feels positively spacious though.

Trackpad

The trackpad sucks. It feels innaccurate, and the buttons require way too much force. The driver situation for them also seems a bit iffy, but that’s my own fault for throwing away the built in OS and installing…

Ubuntu

So I trashed the built in system, but rather than going straight down the Hackintosh route, I thought I’d trying living in Linux first for a while. I develop for Windows and the Mac at work, and sometimes for consoles too, but its a long time since I’ve used a Linux desktop.

So  far I’d have to say that it’s “fine”. I haven’t been blown away, but for what I’ve done on it so far, it works. There is a certain geeky pleasure to be had in installing a custom kernel and tweaking file system parameters for optimised SSD performance, but frankly all of that stuff can be done on a Mac too these days (its Unix with nobs on, basically).

Conclusions

Its too early to tell how much use I’m going to get out of this machine, but for £250 its certainly a considerably smaller outlay than a new, smaller Mac would have been, and it’s quite a lot of fun feeling that I can trash the OS whenever I feel like it, or perhaps try risky hardware mods that I wouldn’t attempt on a bigger machine.

I probably will try to get MacOS running on it soon, just to see how the performance compares with Ubuntu. I’ll probably also get some more RAM, and maybe upgrade the SSD. And perhhaps paint it a silly colour or cover it with stickers. Fun :)