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.

Dell 600m (D600)

I loaded iPC 10.5.6 onto an Inspiron 600m last night just to see if it could be done. It worked decently, but there are no video drivers available for the ATI Mobile Radeon that it uses and it seems to lock up whenever it wants to take a bit of a nap. It's enough for my wife to use for basic word processing until I can get her a new (semi-)permanent machine - she unfortunately needs to get the resume back into shape; one of the recent victims of this economy.

I woudl consider loading up my 700m, but I think it would have the same video problem. I'll wait for the minis to show up.

Why here? Why now?

Why am I starting this blog? Simple - I felt like it. I have a bunch of notebooks and netbooks. Some came with Windows and some with Linux, but none came with MacOS. I consider this a big deficiency.

Let's step back a bit... I love Linux - more than you could imagine. However there are a lot of things missing from Linux that make day-to-day life a pain in the butt.

I also love MacOS. I have used it since beta testing days when programs were written on a Lisa and ported over and the version numbers were less than 1. My first real macintosh was a 128k. I sent out the motherboard to have a third party 512k upgrade done. Then I had a Mac Plus followed by an SE. I had the very first Newton, a MacBook 140, into which I put a 170 motherboard... you get the idea. I remember system 6 then finally system 7 which could run more than one program. I remember the PowerPC architecture coming out and playing with the NeXT cubes.

Then comes OS/X. Unix on a Mac! NetBSD to be specific, but with an interface that not only turn Unix into a usable client frontend, but a Mac nonetheless - I love it! But alas, it is restricted to Apple hardware only; Silly Apple :) Did they really think it would stay restricted?

That brings us up to where we are now. Me with all of these notebooks and versions of OS/X that can be loaded onto them. If you are here to learn how to do this, I am sorry, but this is not meant to be a tutorial. This is just to compare and contrast how well (or not) OS/X runs on various note- and net-books, and hopefully along the way someone will convince Apple that we want this and Apple will decide to allow this without all the hassles.

So what do we use for comparison?

I happen to be writing this on a Dell Vostro 1510. It has a Core Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, a 320GB 7200 RPM drive and an Nvidia graphics card.

XBench (a free benchmarking tool) shows:
Results 103.21
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type ST9320421AS
CPU Test 84.93
GCD Loop 113.41 5.98 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 65.72 1.56 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 55.35 1.83 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 200.23 34.87 Mops/sec
Thread Test 303.89
Computation 473.17 9.59 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 223.82 9.63 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 171.57
System 193.42
Allocate 361.15 1.33 Malloc/sec
Fill 149.68 7277.78 MB/sec
Copy 165.01 3408.20 MB/sec
Stream 154.16
Copy 146.49 3025.72 MB/sec
Scale 152.05 3141.21 MB/sec
Add 159.76 3403.32 MB/sec
Triad 159.11 3403.78 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 150.69
Line 126.61 8.43 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 213.94 63.87 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 147.48 12.02 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 147.68 3.72 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 141.71 8.86 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 82.02
Spinning Squares 82.02 104.05 frames/sec
User Interface Test 206.33
Elements 206.33 946.93 refresh/sec
Disk Test 43.00
Sequential 117.33
Uncached Write 123.24 75.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 131.40 74.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 84.48 24.72 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 153.13 76.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.32
Uncached Write 7.99 0.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 137.08 43.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.08 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 117.32 21.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So there we go - a basis for comparison. While I am waiting for some of the netbooks to show up, I might load up some older notebooks just for fun and practice.