Chromium OS for Macbook Air

I know I’m rather late with this, but I did promise everyone who helped me to buy a Macbook Air that I’d get Chromium OS running on it: so I did and it’s pretty awesome.

Every piece of hardware works except for the Bluetooth (because Bluetooth isn’t supported by Chromium OS yet). So WiFi works, graphics are fully accelerated via nVidia’s drivers, screen brightness controls work, sound works, touchpad works. Basically everything works. The touchpad drivers could use some tweaking, as scrolling is currently painfully slow, but that’s about the only issue I can think of. Boot time is around 22 seconds to the login screen, most of which is wasted by Apple’s EFI implementation, as once control is passed to the kernel, the boot only takes a further 6-7 seconds thanks to the fast SSD inside the Air. Battery life is probably slightly better than that of OS X.

I’ve only tested this on an 11″ model of the Air (MacbookAir3,1), since that’s all I have, but I should think it’d work without issue on the 13″ version (MacbookAir3,2) too. I’ve also not tested previous generations of the Macbook Air, but I suspect they’ll work too. Infact, this image will probably work on quite a number of nVidia-based Macbook/Macbook Pro machines. I won’t be supporting anything but the MacbookAir3,1 and MacbookAir3,2 but if it just happens to work for you on something else, great!

There is however, one huge caveat sadly. Since nVidia’s GPU drivers don’t work very well under an EFI boot, you have to use BIOS emulation mode, probably more commonly known as Boot Camp. However, Apple’s BIOS emulation implementation doesn’t support booting from a USB stick. So, to boot Chromium OS you must first copy it to the SSD, overwriting OS X. It is technically possible to dual-boot, but that’s not something I’m going to support. If this is a route you’re interested in going, simply make sure that the first partition on the CrOS image is the first partition on your SSD, the third partition on the CrOS image is the third on the SSD and that you have a bootloader somewhere configured in the same way as the one on the second partition of the CrOS image. With that said, please don’t ask me for help with dual-booting this.

Installing this to the SSD is pretty easy. You’ll need a 2GB USB stick and the Mac OS X install USB stick that came in the box with your Macbook Air and about 30 minutes. It’d also be a good idea to backup your OS X install using Time Machine before you start, because your OS X install and all data on your Macbook Air will be destroyed during the install process. Ready to start? Let’s go then.

1. FINAL WARNING: You’re going to destroy all of your data by following this guide! I am not responsible for any data loss, make sure you backup your data first!
2. Download the install image from here
3. Extract the archive using your decompression tool of choice (The Unarchiver for Mac works great)
4. Burn the image to a USB stick using dd (check the wiki if you need help with this, same as Flow/Vanilla instructions)
5. Insert both this USB stick and the OS X install drive into your Macbook Air while it’s switched off
6. Hold the “C” key down and press the power button, you can let go of the “C” key once the Apple logo appears
7. Once the language selection screen appears, pick the appropriate option and click next
8. Once the install wizard appears, click Utilities on the bar at the top, and then Terminal
9. Type the following command without quotes: “umount /dev/disk*”
10. Type the following command without quotes: “dd if=/dev/rdisk1 of=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4m count=512″
11. Type the following command without quotes: “bless –device /dev/disk0s2 –setBoot –legacy”
12. Once it says it’s finished (basically when it says X bytes copied in Y seconds), hold down the power button until your machine switches off
13. Remove both your USB stick and the OS X install drive
14. Hit the power button, wait about 22 seconds
15. Enjoy

If you find any problems, let me know via Twitter and I’ll patch the image where required. Once again, a massive thanks to the 39 people who contributed to getting me my Macbook Air in order to produce this port. I know it’s taken many months, but I’ve been hugely busy these past months with exams and college. Once again, if you like what I’m doing, you can also fuel my work by sending mecaffeinated beverages beer by clicking here.

Update: Somebody has tried this on an earlier Macbook Air (ie not the late 2010 one), and it boots but there’s no WiFi. Since Broadcom haven’t updated their drivers, it’s not possible to get WiFi working on these at this time. The image that Dell released has updated drivers from Broadcom, but neither Dell/Broadcom have released source for these yet. If you want this to work, pester Broadcom and as soon as they release updated drivers I’ll update my image. Same probably goes for most other non-Air nVidia based Macs too.

Posted in: Chrome,Chromestory,google,Notebook Italia,os