9 years ago when I wrote the requiem post, I truly intended it to be the last.  After all, with all of those great tablets out there, who could ever expect to have a need for small, low-power laptops ever again?

How wrong I was.  When the world went into lockdown in March, 2020, what was the first piece of technology to have demand far outstrip supply?  Why, Chromebooks of course!

It seems that with ubiquitous high-speed internet, a lightweight notebook, or NetBook, as they were once called, was exactly what everyone needed, especially students and teachers.

While one of my favorite bands, Rush was not the first to say it, I will use them as the source... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  The more that things change, the more they stay the same.

Requiem

I just came upon this blog accidentally.  Mac Netbooks were a great idea at the time, and it was a lot of fun working on them, however the advent and immediate popularity of the iPad and now various Android tablets made the whole Netbook market pretty much collapse.  You can buy used MacBooks on places like eBay and CowBoom if you really need that form factor, and for those persistant Hackintosh fans, there is still the great site http://www.tonymacx86.com

Peace to you all.

HP Mini 311 - the perfect MacNetbook (almost)

I think I have found my new favorite MacNetbook

The HP Mini 311 has been on the market for a little over a month in the US now. Thanks to the guys at NetbookNews, I have one sitting here. A bunch of people, me included, have been working on getting SL up and running perfectly on it. The project is about 98% there right now. A few caviats: As of right now, the included wireless cards are not supported. The N card is close and at some point somebody might figure out the G card. I would order with the N card right now if I was buying this today, or you could do what I have done with the one I already have: buy a separate Dell 1510 card and flash the bios we remove HP's white list.

So what is so great about this MacNetbook? 11.6" size so old people like me can see the screen. NVidia ION graphics accelerator which just flies. N270 or N280 processor (spring the $10 and get the N280 for the faster bus). The keyboard is very close to normal size - 93% I believe. The mic, speakers and headphone jack all work, as do the webcam and the media card reader.

Upgrades are very simple, the bottom has a flap that open s revealing the open slot for RAM (get 2GB more), the half and full size slots for WLAN and WWAN and, of course, the hard drive. I cannot imagine them having made upgrading any easier from a hardware persective.

I am still waiting for the SSD drive that NBN is supposed to be sending to me so I can do the video review I have been waiting for, so I have put a 320GB drive in to tide me over. However all of that room has given me space to install VMWare Fusion and to boot up Google Chrome, Windows XP and Windows 7, all at the same time and with all working comfortably side by side.

The NVidia ION GPU makes playing movies a breeze. All of my AVI files are playing flawlessly without a hiccup or dropped frame to be seen.

How hard is it to Macify or is it Macinate? Assuming that you have an external DVD drive handy, it could not be much easier. You download a CD iso and burn it, boot off of the CD, insert your original Snow Leopard SL DVD (you are paying for SL right?!?) and install SL as you normally would, remembering that you need a guid partition map, not mbr (the "option" button when you partition the drive). When it reboots after the install, you put in the boot CD again, run the installer then take the 10.6.2 update.

The installer installs the boot manager, the kernel extensions and new descriptions needed, and a special version of the kernel that is optimized for the Intel Atom processor. With those few changes, your HP Mini 311 runs as a MacNetbook. As you can see by the screen snaps, things are working happily.

A new MSI Wind U100 MS-N011

Isn't it nice when new hardware comes out with the same model number as older hardware? Sort of reminds me of the early days of Linux wifi; or even the present state of Linux wifi in some cases.

A freind of mine decides to get a Netbook and asks me for some recommendations for hardware that will work well a a Mac. I tell him that the MSI Wind U09/U100 and Samsung NC10 are nice machines and pretty easy to load up. So he goes onto Amazon and preordrrs this brand new version of the MSI Wind.

So... first it will not load anything off of the Samsung external USB DVD burner that he bought. Nor will it reliably load off of any of my external DVD drives, nor off of my USB flash drive. You can imagine how much time I wasted figuring all of this out. Well, I finally break down and put together an external PATA/USB setup and load iDeneb 1.4 (10.5.6) onto it with the MSI Wind settings.

So I now have this drive and it is all ready to go. or not. It does boot and give me the text of a boot, but that's it. I end up having to wipe out everything AppleIntel* from the Extensions folder. That lets me boot to 800x600. Anyone who knows the author of osx86tools, please let him know that he needsa to redesign the interface sao that those with only 600 pixels of height can get to the bottom buttons.

So not I can boot to 800x600 without any drivers. I load up a recent version of the GMA950 drivers and then I am able to boot into 1024x600. No QE/CI - not even with osx86tools. I hunted around and found a link that gave me an even newer 950 driver and I loaded up a few packages with kext helper and finally I have QE/CI.

The package in question may be found at http://www.apple-macademia.co.uk/GMA950stuff.zip

Wireless was pretty easy, but there should be a big sticker somewhere stating that wireless is off by default and you have to press Fn/F11 to turn it on. Talk about wasting time! sheesh!

Be careful upgrading this one to 10.5.7. Even using the iDeneb updater I ended up having to wipe all of the Apple Intel kexts and reloadung them all again.

The real pain here seems to be the Genesys Logic Inc. 1.08 webcam (05e3:0505). It almost works, but not quite. That is the last thing I have to do. So close, yet so far...

10.5.7

Just wanted to drop a quick note saying that I did my first 10.5.7 upgrade on an iDeneb machine - my personal Vostro 1510 and all went well. So all of you out there running Chameleon, rest assured that it will get you through a 10.5.7 upgrade, or at least that it did for me.

More 1510...

Wouldn't it be great if I received those netbooks? Hey Sascha... yoohoo...

So I received a new Vostro 1510 for my wife to replace her MacBook that belong to the company for which she no longer works. This one was a little different than the last one. The wireless was a 1395, not a 1390 and it has sleep apnia or some other sleep-related issue.

Finally got it running properly with iPC and the Dell Post-Installer, which is where the 1395 drivers hide apparently. Also has to put a special sleep kernel onto it, which is actually a holdover from 10.5.3. But another successful load. The trick with Intel X3100 loads is the x and the v, at least until you get the right video drivers into place. Otherwise forget it.

Speaking of successful loads and Vostro 1510s, my original 1510 was feeling left out, running Kalyway 10.5.5, so I prepped as best I could and allowed software update to install 10.5.6. FIrst reboot sat there spinning its wheel for a minute, rebooted then *poof* 10.5.6! Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Intel video on a Dell 1510 (or anything else with X3100)

Wow - what a pain. Apparently the drivers for X3100 that ship with anything after 10.5.2 do not work with QE/CI, so you need to load up the 10.5.2 version and erase the Integrated Framebuffer kernel extension.

However once you have it loaded up all is good. I discovered this the hard way - I ordered a Vostro 1510 for a friend off of ebay and when I went to load it up I discovered that it did not have nvidia video. oops.

Also I discovered that the Dell 139x wireless works just fine and I didn't need to order that Atheros card from Hong Kong. again... oops. But the Atheros card is much faster, so I'll have a use for it. I am sure I will post it here.

Speaking of Dell wireless, the drivers on the iPC disc work much better then the ones on the iDeneb disc, although the iDeneb distribution in general work better for the 1510.