The following guide is a collection of notes on installing OSX on the Atom processor (N270) thereby creating a Hackintosh. The machine used for the install is an Acer Aspire One ZG5 but most of this document will apply to other Atom-powered notebooks.

The chosen OSX version is Snow Leopard and, for a painless install, you have to have access to an OSX 10.6 DVD or image. OSX 10.6.2 removes support for Atom processors so that before upgrading to 10.6.8 (the last version of Snow Leopard at the date of writing), you have to install a patched 10.6.8 kernel injected with support for Atom.

Perhaps the best method, albeit the most difficult, is to install OSX from a vanilla source, such as an original installation DVD. The OSX version used here is Snow Leopard, but the same principles will apply to other versions.

The install procedure involves, in sequence:

1. Restore a Snow Leopard 10.6 install disk to an USB hard-drive.
   1. Prepare the USB hard-drive by loading the necessary kernel extensions from the preparing the bootable installer section.
2. Restore an iBoot ISO to an USB pen-drive.
3. Plug both the hard-drive and the pen-drive into the destination machine.
4. Boot from iBoot and select the USB hard-drive at the prompt.
5. Install OSX onto the machine.
6. Reboot and boot again from iBoot, this time selecting the OSX installation and using the boot flags in the booting section. This can be done by selecting the drive to which OSX was installed and then typing them at the prompt.
7. Install Chameleon on OSX by following the instructions in the install chameleon section.
8. Upgrade OSX to the latest version by following the instructions in the upgrade OSX section.

First you have to restore a Snow Leopard 10.6 image to your USB hard-drive using Disk Utility. This will make the USB hard-drive bootable but it will not be able to boot without a little help from Chameleon.

After restoring a Snow Leopard 10.6 image to the USB hard-drive, we can edit it by mounting the USB drive and loading it with some essential extensions. Download all of the following extensions:

• AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext.zip
• AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext.zip
• AppleRTC.kext.zip
• CPUi.kext.zip
• FakeSMC.kext.zip
• IO80211Family.kext.zip
• IOATAFamily.kext.zip
• IOSDHCIBlockDevice.kext.zip
• NullCPUPowerManagement.kext.zip
• RealtekR1000.kext.zip
• SleepEnabler.kext.zip
• VoodooBattery.kext.zip
• VoodooHDA.kext.zip
• VoodooPowerMini.kext.zip
• VoodooPS2Controller.kext.zip

from the Snow Leopard kernel extension asset page.

unzip them and place them on the USB drive in the System/Library/Extensions/ folder by overwriting any existing files.

Next, we correct the permissions on the kernel extensions:

chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions

On first boot, Snow Leopard should be booted with the kernel parameters:

-s -x -v -f arch=i386

where:

If successful, you will now be in single-user mode and you should run:

fsck -fy

in order to perform a disk check and then:

mount -uw /

to mount root in read-write mode.

Lastly, type exit to proceed with loading the OSX window manager.

After booting for the first time, you should download Chameleon again and install it on OSX. Additionally, copy the Extra/ folder from Chameleon to /Extra/ on OSX.

In the /Extra/ folder on OSX, you have to place the SMBIOS.plist and the DSDT.aml files. Both of them can be downloaded from here:

A successful install of Chameleon on the OSX HDD will have the following structure:

root
+----+ boot
|
+----+ mach_kernel
|
+----+ Extra
         |
         +-------+ org.chameleon.Boot.plist
         |
         +-------+ SMBIOS.plist
         |       + DSDT.aml
         |
         +-------+ Preboot.dmg

Upgrading OSX should be first done by locating the kernel package for the OSX version that you wish to upgrade to. Installing the kernel package and then using a combo-pack or, in this case, directly from the Apple Software Update menu item. You can get the Atom legacy kernel from here:

The package should be downloaded and installed on OSX. Once installed, the new kernel will be placed in /legacy_kernel and we need to edit org.chameleon.Boot.plist to point Chameleon to the new kernel. In org.chameleon.Boot.plist update the following tags to match the following example:

        <key>Kernel</key>
        <string>legacy_kernel</string>
        <key>Kernel Flags</key>
        <string>arch=i386 FSB=533 memoryType=19 memorySpeed=533 busratio=12 -legacy</string>
        <key>GenerateCStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>GeneratePStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>

The next step is to either download the combo-pack or use Software Update from the menu to update.

Although it is common knowledge that sleep functions do not work on the AOA150 it seems that sleep does work but that it requires some patches to the RTC kernel extension provided by apple and a good DSDT. The common symptom is that the kernel panics on AOA150 when recovering from standby. Patching the RTC can be done with the DSDT patcher (mirrored locally) by running the patcher as root and by following the on-screen information. In the event that the patch succeeded, the DSDT.aml has to be copied to /Extra/DSDT.aml.

After that, you can install SleepEnabler.kext and then issue the command, as root:

pmset -a hibernatemode 0

in order to disable hibernation and to use only sleep.