Bagel Belly Blog

EeeMac

So, back in November I picked up the Asus EeePC 901 (901 specs), in the interests of research and geek fun. I installed Ubuntu Netbook remix on it, then plain Ubuntu, but it mostly languished on the shelf. I found linux a little sluggish and honestly, although it was cute the lack of Mac OS X was a real pain. I need my eye candy and proprietary lock-in.

I was, therefore, curious and excited to discover the EeeMac blog, particularly with a rundown of installing OS X on an EeePC 901. I'd previously tried installing OS X on a Dell laptop, with moderate success, so I understood the basics. I just hadn't twigged that the same thing could be done on a netbook.

With this in mind, last week I bought a couple of upgrades for the 901 - specifically a 2GB RAM upgrade from Crucial, and a faster, bigger RunCore solid state drive (SSD) from MemoryC. Both of these were trivially easy to install after unscrewing the access panel on the bottom of the 901. I did try Ubuntu with the 2gb upgrade, but there was no significant speed increase.

Actually, the 901 is an amazing little machine, and from reading reports and looking at the guts inside, it's clearly a hacker's dream, with the possibility to add a homebrew 3G data solution, more storage, touchscreen, and so on. It's unusual for a laptop to be as readily upgradeable as a desktop machine. No wonder Asus are selling boatloads of them.

Last night I went through the install process, and I tested it out a little today to make sure everything was working. Sure enough it is, and although there's a couple of areas requiring some polish, for example slightly incorrect keymappings (they are all in the right place on the keyboard, but the keys have the wrong things printed on them, so the command key is labelled "Alt" etc.), a crufty third-party wifi manager instead of the OS X one. But these are things I can ignore on a day-to-day basis, or seek out solutions for, or wait until someone else does.

This evening I've been installing all my usual required apps (Adium, iTerm, DropBox, MenuMeters, Teleport, Ecto, NetNewsWire, Transmit, for a start). Then over the next few days I'll really put it through it's paces, and see how it holds up. I'll keep you posted ...

Technorati Tags: apple, asus, computing, eee pc, hardware, install, leopard, linux, mac, macosx, osx, software, ubuntu, upgrade