What if you had something like a MacBook Air, but smaller and cheaper. All your OS X Snow Leopardy goodness, the apps you're used to? How would you set it up? How would you do it?


[Note: The opinions and methods here are my own. Future Shop is not responsible for the ways I choose to use my own personal equipment.]

We know that once Apple switched to using Intel chips, Macs could run Windows natively. We get BootCamp included with OS X so we can choose to partition our drives, install Windows and then we can boot into Windows or OS X (or Ubuntu actually) whenever we want.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if Macs can run Windows, then PCs...

And thus was born the "Hackintosh"-- OSx86 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia --installing and running OS X on a "PC" or just a non-Apple, Intel-powered computer.

Enter the netbook. A low-cost PC that comes with Windows or Linux pre-installed. Netbooks are light, small, and ...

Hold on a second, I wonder if...

Yes you can. And people seem to be doing it in droves.

I was inspired by Alexandra Samuel's post to give it a shot (I'm a sucker for easy instructions)-- Making a Mac netbook, part 2: How to install the Mac OS on a Windows or Unix netbook | Social Signal --so since I couldn't sleep Wednesday night I started on the journey.

The first test, as Alex described, was to see if I could boot from an external drive into OS X. And the envelope please ...

Yes! In fact a quick run with Apple's DiskUtility brought the 8 GB SSD drive back from the dead! This was a major coup I thought. The next step was to prepare a bootable installer. Lo and behold a partition of the bootable drive, a quick clone and ... ta da!


Well almost. Had some issues rebooting from the 16GB SD card that was to be the main HD. Hm. Oh! Wait! Cloning!

On my MBP I just cloned the first bootable partition onto the 16GB and ...


Yep that works.

Now there are instructions to be followed and you must have patience young Jedi. There is a lot of copying, installing (on a pretty slow machine), and tweaking to be done.


To get my particular netbook to run OS X I used these instructions extensively (though I combined with some of Alex's): eee Mac journey: Install OS X on an EEE PC 900A, 901, 1000, 1000H, 1000HD (and possibly HE) Version ...


I'm not quite done yet, but my Eee PC 901 that was purchased with XP and has run several flavours of Linux is now running Snow Leopard! Part two of this post will be what apps I'm installing on my new MicroMac to make it a portable writing station and generally cool tool to have around.