Mac OS X on the Acer Aspire One 110L

Back in last September, I purchased one of the early netbooks, the Acer Aspire One. I cracked it open to upgrade the ram to 1.5GB and was generally enthusiastic about the hardware and the form factor. It was a neat little machine. But really, the Linpus Lite OS installed on the thing had to go. I tried various flavors of Linux, including Ubuntu and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. But nothing seemed to really feel or work quite right.

So it was with some interest that I began reading about various success stories of people installing Mac OS X on Netbooks (aka hackintoshes). From all reports, the Dell Mini 9 and MSI Wind were the most hardware compatible, with my Netbook, the Acer Aspire One having some core issues. But I figured I had nothing to lose by trying it out.

So, using iDeneb’s installer, along with some small tweaks, I had it going in about an hour. It’s a good install, but there are currently 3 notable problems: first, there are no working drivers for the Atheros wireless card, so I’m going to have to switch it out for a Broadcom 1390 (found one on ebay for 5 bucks) to get the wireless working. Second, the computer won’t sleep, at all. Lastly, while the SDHC card reader on the machine can be coaxed into reading SD (apparently, I haven’t tried it yet), the experimental driver does not support SDHC. yet.

So, after I swap the wifi out, apart from the sleep issue, it will be pretty near 100% functional. Not bad for a small cheap little Mac!

A nice little writeup on the install is here.

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1. The Beast: Rockin a 3Ghz quad-core hackintosh