Using a Mac to install Honeycomb on the NOOK Color

In this episode, we're going to use a Mac computer to

install Honeycomb on the NOOK Color

. We're using a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.6.7 but the process will be the same on any OS 10 Mac.

First, you'll need to download the nookhoney04 zipped disk image file from bscotch.tv/nookhoney if you haven't already done so. Now, Unzip the file. The 190MB file becomes a nearly 4GB image file.

Now, we'll insert our SD card and open up a Terminal window. Type "diskutil list". In the resulting list, we're looking for our microSD card, which should be pretty easy to find. Look for the brand of your microSD card and check that the size corresponds to the size of the card. In our example, the SD card is disk1 and we can confirm the size which is 4GB.

Now, we unmount the disk using the command:
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk number, in this case disk1

We're presented with notification that "unmount of all volumes on disk (number) was successful."

Now type:
dd if=nookhoney04.img of=/dev/rdisk(number) bs=1m

This command tells terminal to write the nookhoney04.img disk image that we unzipped bit-for-bit to the microSD card. The process will take about 10 minutes and Terminal will give you a message when it's done. Once that's finished, just pop the microSD card out of your computer.

On the bottom right corner of your NOOK Color, open the microSD card slot and insert the microSD card. Power it up and about 45 seconds later, you're in Android 3.0, Honeycomb. When you browse around, you'll notice a distinct lack of any Google apps, most notably the Android Market. Getting that installed is a little more involved so we'll be covering that in an upcoming episode.

If you're a dedicated Mac user, skip ahead to episode three of this series. If you're more of a PC person, the next episode will walk you through writing the nookhoney image to your microSD card in Windows.