To Tiger or To Leopard: The Eee PC Dilemma

There’s no easy answer to this question. You bought an Eee to run Mac OS X on it. Normally, Leopard is the natural answer since “it’s the latest and greatest”.

Now, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is, Leopard doesn’t run as well as Tiger does on the Eee “out-of-the-box”. The Eee PC has an Intel GMA 900, a graphics chip that was never officially supported by Apple. The only Apple system to ship with such support, as the Developer Transition Kit… as the GMA 950 wasn’t ready for prime time.

Of course ASUS, to cut costs, went with the obsolete GMA 900 versus the GMA 950. So, we’re stuck with two bad choices: Run Tiger and use out-of-date software, or force Leopard to run with little-to-buggy graphics acceleration.

All of the current GMA 900 enablers for Leopard just don’t work well; they cause graphical glitches and issues. However, Leopard also takes a performance hit, running at only 900 MHz on the Eee, it’s not the fastest system for the OS by any stretch.

At MacEee.com, we’re going to roll out supported, step-by-step instructions for both Tiger and Leopard on the Eee PC.