Asus Eee PC - What Do You Think?

[DanS]

Last week I was reading about the Eee PC officially launching in Taiwan on October 16 and appearing in the US by the end of this month at such outlets as Best Buy and Newegg. For those unfamiliar with this system, it is an ultralight laptop unveiled at Computex 2007 with an initial price of $199; the price since has risen. One of its interesting features is the inclusion of a flash hard drive instead of a platter drive. Following are some links for more information:

 

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3829

 

http://www.translate.ru/url/tran_url.asp?l...mp;psubmit2.y=0

 

The reason I posted this is for the specifications listed on the Russian site:

 

Processor - Intel Celeron M 900 MHz ULV, cache L2 of 256 Mb, FSB 400 MHz

 

Chipset - Intel NG82910GMLE/NH82801FBM

 

Video - Integrated Intel 910GMLE Express

 

I am curious on whether this laptop could have OSX successfully installed on it. If so, it could become the Powerbook Mini that has been speculated/theorized/wished for by the Mac community but not built by Apple. Of course, it will be awhile until the system is in the hands of consumers.

 

What do you think?

[devilhood]

Haven't got the foggiest. I reckon it would be troublesome though. Is anyone running a Mac with a similar onboard graphics solution? haven't even heard of the 910GMLE before. Must be platform specific to this particular model.

It also uses Flash memory instead of a Hard disk.

 

Sounds like a very isolated kind of design, I doubt you will be able to successfully install a Mac on it.

[Danyel]

Hi DanS:

 

When I first heard of this PC, I wanted to get one. In terms of space, it would be possible to fit the whole OS X and some applications and documents onto 8GB Partition. I'm typing this message on Dell Inspiron 1300 with 8GB OS X Partition and I have around 2.13GB left (!)

 

The Russian website showed the laptop running Windows XP, so it should be possible to run others OS'es (including Mac OS X).

 

This topic has been discussed before here:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...03&hl=eeepc

 

--danyel

[DanS]

That's what happens when you don't do a Forum Search.

[Zombiepron]

Yeah, I have a feeling its gonna take some patching to ge that one going.

I would think that the difference of it working or not would be it the flash interface was in the hardware or if it was software based.

[Synaesthesia]

Yeah, I have a feeling its gonna take some patching to ge that one going.

I would think that the difference of it working or not would be it the flash interface was in the hardware or if it was software based.

Well it does have a GMA 950

 

Hopefully we can dual boot between Mac OS X and the included Linux (!)

[DanS]

Well someone on Uneasysilence has OSX running on the EeePC. Read here

 

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/11/12654/

 

Because of the specs, Tiger runs better than Leopard.

 

HEY APPLE! Why don't you just buy an upgraded version from Asustek, slap your logo on it, and call it the Macbook Mini.

[clockworx]

Well it does have a GMA 950

 

Hopefully we can dual boot between Mac OS X and the included Linux (!)

 

Finding official specs is a pain in the ass, but from what I've seen (and on wiki), it's actually a GMA900. I'm not sure what difference that makes, if any, in terms of QE/CI.

[nirvanaguy19]

wow, that is pretty sweet

i wonder if we can get some xbench scores, GMA 900 means qe/ci, with a solid state drive and such a small display, that is perfect

[Nitramusa]

Well someone on Uneasysilence has OSX running on the EeePC. Read here

 

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/11/12654/

 

Because of the specs, Tiger runs better than Leopard.

 

HEY APPLE! Why don't you just buy an upgraded version from Asustek, slap your logo on it, and call it the Macbook Mini.

 

Omg! If this is real, and everything works patched, lol ill buy it fo sure! With a nice MacBook-like white Apple sticker on it..

 

Really nice, ultra portable MacBook

[GekkePrutser]

I have an EEEPC (4GB SSD/512MB Ram).. I tried installing OSX86 on it, and I have to say it runs fairly OK. I used the JaS image, and DiaboliK's GMA900 drivers, using the wire trick in the VGA port. I also used the PowerManagement Bundle here to get the battery indicator to work. Sleep doesn't work, it goes to sleep fine but when it awakes it reboots

 

It is actually quite snappy except the graphical effects (genie effect, dock bouncing etc) are like they are happening in slowmotion. I think this is due to the slow CPU (900 Mhz but Asus downclocked it to 630 Mhz). The lack of SSE3 probably also gives it some extra work. But moving windows around, and starting simple applications like Mail is pretty snappy. I could really see myself using this as a Mail/Websurfing OS X box on the road, not for more serious work of course.

 

It boots quite fast, 45 seconds or so. Because it's a flashdrive I disabled Swapping, Journalling and Spotlight indexing and I see almost no writes now. So it can be made Flash-Friendly. I installed just the base package and have a little over 1GB free.

 

I was surprised how useful it is, and I would gladly use it like this if it weren't for the fact that none of the networking options are working at the moment: both WiFi (AR5BXB63) and Wired (Atheros L2) don't seem to have any driver support. So I'm back on the old Linux-based OS that comes with it, for now. I'll keep an eye out on the forums here though, having just the Wifi working would be great!

 

Edit: By the way, here's 2 pages of screenshots and howto's from other people who also got it going: Number one, and Number two

 

Edit2: I just had an idea: I saw that my mac mini intel has a mini-PCIE card. I have no need for wireless on that one so I might stick it in the EEEPC, would be cool if it worked! I read in the various topics here that it may not work if the bios doesn't support it (if it doesn't have the right DSDT tables?) but I could always try I guess! Will let you guys know how I go once I have time (and the courage to break the warranty seals on my EEEPC)

[GekkePrutser]

Ok.. I did it! I voided my warranty and installed the wifi card from the mac mini in the eee. It works! Sort of....

 

It detects it but says "AirPort: Not Configured". In ifconfig it comes up as en0. No wonder it is acting weird. I read something about it on the forum here, so I'll look into it tomorrow after I've had an already-way-too-short sleep.

 

I just wanted to let you know that the eeepc does in principe seem to accept other wifi cards under mac os so I don't think there is a bios problem. In fact, I can even use the bios to turn the card on and off

 

Edit: I edited the network plist and now it works! Like a breeze!

 

Well, for some reason the menu bar icons are very slow but I'll look into that. First order of business will be to expand the RAM from 512 to 2GB anyway. I hope lots of ram might compensate for the slow CPU a bit.

[Schwinn555]

Looks like a fun machine ! Can people really live with a 7 in screen ?? i don't think I can otherwise I'd be all over it.

[GekkePrutser]

It is a fun machine for sure! Of course the 7" screen is tiny but don't forget that this is not meant as a standard computer or even a laptop. I don't even think it's a good laptop replacement. It's just handy in case a laptop is too big or heavy to carry somewhere and you still want to have a computer for the small tasks on the road like emailing, web surfing etc or making small changes to documents.

 

For that stuff the 7" is adequate but not brilliant. It's a shame they didn't fit in a bigger screen, there is a huge black border around the screen and they could have fit in a 9" in the same bezel easily. Also the 800x480 resolution is a bit awkward in Mac OS, some screens can't be resized or scrolled (like the network settings in System Preferences or the accounts preferences in Mail) and it's really a pain to get to them then.

 

So in short, it's useable but not great. But modding it was great fun

[catfesh]

Hey Gekke!

 

I'm here too now (for the others - the screenshots linked above with the ugly {censored} using the built in webcam are mine).

 

The bottom line is that it's proving to be very difficult to get working properly. This is primarily IMO due to the fact that wired Ethernet doesn't work and never will - every test re-install from various ISOs requires a USB DVD drive and as standard it appears to run 1.1 speed.

 

I've been hacking and re-installing away for more than a week now every night (just started a new job 2 weeks ago so I'm not doing myself any favours at all) - each re-install takes a good half hour, trying different combinations of kexts and sources.

 

Does anyone know any faster alternatives? If I could get the JaS and Mac.nub ISOs onto bootable USB2 flash drives (which the Eee appears to support booting from) then the whole merry-go-round process could be made much faster.

 

Unfortunately, unlike proper Macs, there's no firewire port on the Eee to boot from. Can the ISOs be loaded onto bootable USB hard drives?

 

Yeah I know this sounds like a complete n00b question but I gave up on generic PC hardware nearly 10 years ago... been using Macs since the first OS X preview. Not a complete n00b either, I got my iPhone working on Vodafone UK on Sept 12th, been hacking software for 24 years - but I guess the limited hardware base of the Mac world has spoilt me. And I've been having to get back into understanding the x86 arch and massive variety of chipsets....

 

Incidentally - the standard Xandros Linux partition scheme on the Eee has an EFI partition - does this mean that the Eee supports EFI as well as the standard BIOS... and we could potentially boot GUID partition scheme OS X installs??