Raoul Duke's Gonzo Adventures

[raoulduke]

Cool.  Thank you.  Not that I'm doing a lot of Photoshopping (on these machines) but I'll probably return the monitor to the LC if I ever fix it.  512x384 in 256 colors seems a little underpowered for the Power Mac.  Does the monitor automatically degauss when it turns on (it's been a long time, sorry lol)?

 

[NJRoadfan]

The AppleColor RGB monitor for the IIgs (Model A2M6014) will not work on a Macintosh.

 

[raoulduke]

Gotcha, and this is M1296 (?).

 

[raoulduke]

I 'broke' this in 2010; turned out it just required a BIOS update that has to be done blind because for some reason the screen spontaneously stops working (prior to the update). Anyway, this satisfies my interest in an ultra-low power HackNetbook and trying to run OS X on Atom. However, it won't work with Mavericks because it's got 512mb on the board but will only accept 1gb otherwise (so it currently has 1.5gb). I'm working on installing Lion at the moment.

 

[quinterro]

I had several of those Aspire One netbooks at one time in the past.  The last one was pink (I'm secure in my manhood ) that I gave to my niece.  They weren't bad but memory capacity definitely was not one of their strong points.  That and having to disassemble it to the chassis and remove the motherboard to get to the hard drive or memory slot.

 

[raoulduke]

I bought mine in Cairo in 2010.  I walked into a 'computer mall' and basically went to every store until I found the cheapest netbook.  The RAM is a real problem, though.  But the BIOS is even worse.  I can't get any version of Lion or ML to load so far; so I'm trying SL again (which hasn't booted properly yet).  In the process, I somehow corrupted my main Mavericks partition on my desktop so I had to reinstall that this afternoon and that (again) caused a Boot0 problem that I have been trying to fix since then.  I just finished reinstalling Mavericks to my E6410 (because I accidentally wiped its EFI partition instead of mount_hfs'ing it lol (that's on me)).  So now we'll see if copying and pasting works on the desktop because I clearly screwed up the EFI boot option in the installer.  Then hopefully SL will simultaneously finish and work on the AOA150.  Nope to both lol.  I wonder if I could have just used myHack on the desktop.

I have a very fast SD card in there so it should be pretty low-power too.

 

[raoulduke]

Hey Quinterro, you didn't use any of the AOA150's as hack books did you?

 

[raoulduke]

This was difficult - this is 10.6.6.  Quick question though, I have an Airport of some sort possibly Extreme.  It has three connectors for antennae but it does not recognize at all.  I'll get another Airport but I'm just curious why that might be.

 

[quinterro]

Mine ran XP or Linux.  Never tried OS X on them.

 

[jruschme]

This was difficult - this is 10.6.6.  Quick question though, I have an Airport of some sort possibly Extreme.  It has three connectors for antennae but it does not recognize at all.  I'll get another Airport but I'm just curious why that might be.

It's probably based on an Atheros wireless chip. For Mac OS X, you want one based on a Broadcom chip. (The exact opposite advice of what'd you get if you were going to run Linux.

I'm kind of not surprised that you can only run SL. Is that generation of Atom even 64-bit compatible? (If not, then it rules out Lion.) And I suspect that you have something like GMA945 or GMA950 graphics which aren't supported after Lion, anyway.

If you can't tell... I did once try to run SL on an AspireOne D250 (a pink one at that), but got fed up with the compromises.

 

[raoulduke]

The original wifi card was an incompatible Atheros.  I may not have explained myself properly.

I replaced the Atheros card with an Airport Extreme card that has three connectors for three wires (does that mean it's b/g/n?  I don't know much about the hardware standards).  That wifi card (a Macbook Airport Extreme) worked fine in my T61 with I think 10.7.  It doesn't currently recognize on the AOA150.

However, at the moment, SL will only boot with "-f" which I know has a weird impact on network stuff (for instance my desktop can only use its ethernet card booting via rebuilding the kernel cache).  So it may be that when booting with "-f", this machine or SL or both have trouble recognizing the Airport Extreme.  It doesn't really matter I bought another Airport card (with 2 connectors) for $3.50.

Quinterro mine originally ran XP also.  I honestly only used it for work and then when the BIOS problem first surfaced I put it away until I salvaged it for parts probably a year or two ago (which is why the palmrest is broken).

What's even weirder - and I truly hope I took the battery out without realizing and hence cut the power accidentally - is that machine 'broke' again last night and I had to flash the BIOS again.  But I had previously flashed the BIOS to 3310 (but it had reverted to pre-3309).  It has no CMOS battery at the moment but that's still really weird.

 

[CC_333]

Lion will support 32-bit, but I think it needs a 64-bit capable CPU to install properly (you can hack around that to get it running on an un-upgraded CoreDuo Mac Mini, which is definitely 32-bit only, so it could be made to work).

Also, the minimum RAM for Lion is normally 1 GB, so 512 MB might make your experience miserable.

c

 

[raoulduke]

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/281072-thoughts-about-mountain-lion-with-atom-yes-atom/

but...

http://www.hackintoshosx.com/files/file/213-atom-1084/

I doubt my chip supports 64-bit anything though. The question is whether various bootflags will make a difference in which case CC I'd probably go with your method of installing eleswhere (which at least in my experience for laptops is not very consistent or stable - based on an AMD laptop repeatedly attempted via Intel desktops).

I will try ML (I don't think I've gotten an installer to boot yet) and then Lion (which I have but I forget if to an actual installer or just past the bootloader). In theory one could bootflag the installers also (which I haven't tried with Lion yet). Also probably replace mach_kernel with the patched versions.

What was odd too, though, is that the Airport was what was preventing OS X from booting without -f.

 

[raoulduke]

I've never used PhoneNet before...  Can anyone relay drivers to me?  (And do I need proprietary ones for this AESP clone?)  Also does anyone know of a good tutorial?  (I'll probably try to use this with my SE.  So the question is do I need a PhoneNet adapter on the other end or can I use a modem?)

 

[Gil]

I've never used PhoneNet before...  Can anyone relay drivers to me?  (And do I need proprietary ones for this AESP clone?)  Also does anyone know of a good tutorial?  (I'll probably try to use this with my SE.  So the question is do I need a PhoneNet adapter on the other end or can I use a modem?)

PhoneNet does not require drivers. It's plug-n-play. Have to have an adapter for each device on the bus. Terminate the ends of the bus. Also only 2-pair, 4-wire telephone cables will work...not the single-pair, 2-wire cables.

 

[raoulduke]

Thank you. Now all I need is a second one for $1.49...

 

[raoulduke]

ROM 3.

Also, the monitor (the hi-res monitor; i was just debugging with the color composite) makes a perturbing but basically inaudible buzzing sound.  also initially the thing flickered and seemed to have no vertical hold; it's stable after adjusting the controls, but the picture is wide (if i try to reduce the horizontal it reverts back to the problem state).  so is the buzzing potentially an early flyback issue; or does that and the flicker suggest some issue in the monitor's A/B board (or equivalent - does it have an A/B board)?

Also, does the hi-res cable really only have like 5 pins?  And then a lot of gaps...

 

[olePigeon]

It's only a few pins with lots of gaps.

Very, very nice score.  Boxed ROM 3 is excellent.

 

[raoulduke]

Thanks.  Everything was boxed; the 5.25" drive is hard to see in the background.  It oddly came with a Macally Extended Keyboard box too [which I guess people were paying $70 for back in the day].

 

[raoulduke]

The bottom of my computer's box has had the tape come off (so the bottom literally drops out).  While driving to get cat food I forgot to get yesterday, I saw a box labeled "Xmas decorations" on the side of the street.  Exact same model.  Pretty bizarre.