Thursday, July 21, 2011

Using PowerPC applications in Lion with VMWare Fusion

Just a reminder if you're going to upgrade: 10.7 doesn't include Rosetta so it no longer supports running PowerPC applications. This includes Adobe CS2.

You can get around this with VMWare Fusion if you have that:
  • Create a new virtual machine for Mac OS X server (choose 64 bit if your computer supports it)
  • In the finder, right-click this newly created virtual machine and choose Open With...->VMDK Mounter
  • Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your current hard drive to this. You probably want to exclude unnecessary files to speed this up. I excluded my Downloads and Documents folder, ~/Library/Caches, and any applications that I don't need to run on this image
  • VMWare will only run an OSX server guest. To fake this, open Terminal and "sudo  touch System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist"
Then you should be able to open your Mac OSX image like any other. Make sure to install the VMWare tools. I had to re-authorize Photoshop, but other than that it seems to be working great. Well, as great as a 6-year old program going through virtualization and binary translation could ever hope to run.

Debating between spending $200 on the educational version of CS5.5 or switching to Aperture for $80, but this will at least tide me over in the short term

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