Installing Snow Leopard on the Aspire One via a Live Leopard Install
This method is similar to one Mechdrew posted on his site. Leopard is booted off a USB stick or HDD, allowing vanilla Snow Leopard to be install to the AAO’s internal drive, and then patched to allow it to boot. This process is time consuming so you’ll probably want to try other methods first.
Stuff what you need:
An Aspire One with 1GB of RAM (According to SL’s specs, it might let you off with 512mb, I don’t know).
An external drive >= 8GB in size.
iDeneb 1.4 on a DVD
Snow Leopard (on a disc + USB DVD drive or a disc image on an external drive)
What works and what doesn’t:
Sleep & Hibernation – KP’s when trying to resume :-/
Audio – Requires a kext, headphones and speakers work but not internal or external mics.
GMA 950 – Works out of the box at full resolution, issues with external monitors.
WiFi – Works great after swapping the card for a DW1390 which is natively supported.
Ethernet – Requires a fix.
Trackpad – Works great, even supports two finger scrolling =D
Webcam – Works out of the box.
Back up everything on you AAO’s hard drive, it will be formatted during the install.
Step One:
Install leopard to an external hard drive or USB stick. For this I used iDeneb 1.4. You can connect a USB drive and USB DVD drive to your AAO and install it that way, but I just booted the DVD in a laptop and installed it from there. Just choose the iDeneb base package and the Aspire One 150 package, leave the rest.
Step Two:
Boot Leopard from the USB stick or USB hard drive by taping F12 burring the BIOS. If your drive doesn’t appear then reboot and try again. At the chameleon bootloader type without quotes “-x”. It will take a little while to boot, after that follow the setup process and you’ll be presented with the desktop. It’s lacking drivers but that really doesn’t matter.
Step Three:
Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and click on your AAO’s hard drive, choose ‘Partition’ and choose a single partition, this guide will not go in to dual booting. Call the drive whatever you want, this can be changed later. Use Mac OS X Journaled unless you’re using an SSD, in which case use non-journaled Mac OS Extended. Now Hit Apply.
Step Four:
It’s finally time to install Snow Leopard =D First mount the install DVD, connect a DVD with the disk in or mount the disk image from another external drive. If you can find a way of packing it on the the Leopard drive that will work too.
Open finder and choose Go > Go to folder. Type /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/ and press return. Now launch OSInstall.mpkg, note, NOT OSInstall.pkg. Follow the prompts and choose the aspire one’s internal drive. I chose to uncheck everything but Rosetta and X11, but you can install whatever packages you want. Let the installer do it’s thing.
Step Five:
Almost there, if you were to reboot at this point it would kernel panic immediately, not cool. Download Netbook Installer here. Ignore the warning about an unsupported device, choose the AAO’s internal drive, check the chameleon boot loader and general extensions, and let it do it’s thing.
Now you can reboot, Snow Leopard will take a while to boot, so just give it time. You should see the welcome video but there wont be any sound, so just hum along if you know the tune 
Step Six:
Now you’re at the desktop you can install VoodooHDA to get audio working, download it and install it with Kext Helper.
Step Seven – Optional
Updating to 10.6.2 is very easy. Intel Atom support was removed from the kernel, but you can still boot using the 10.6.0 or 10.6.1 kernels. Open the terminal and type the following command to backup your kernel.
cd /
sudo cp mach_kernel mach_kernel.backup
You can now safely update via Software Update (I wouldn’t recommend installing other updates). When the machine reboots leave it and it should boot up fine, otherwise type “mach_kernel.backup” at chameleon. About this mac should say 10.6.2.
Since neither Sleep or Hibernation work on OS X on the AAO, you might want to install InsomniaX or DoNotSleep.pkg. If you do put your AAO to sleep, when it resumes it will simply reboot and when ever it boots try to load the sleep image which will fail. If this happens boot your external Leopard drive and use Netbook Installer to reinstall Chameleon and general extensions.
About This Mac will show the correct RAM info but show the CPU as “1.6GHz Unknown”. Install this package to get the CPU string updated.
You can go to System Preferences > Trackpad and enable two finger scrolling, which works much better than edge scrolling on the tiny trackpad.
