Installing Adobe CS6 on case-sensitive drives (Mac OS X)
Well, everybody knows that Adobe are a [censored] company. Their products are the defacto standard for image/video editing and designing, but their codebase really suck. No excuses.
The problem addressed here is that Creative Studio™ refuses to install on a case-sensitive drive on Mac OS X. And it doesn't just refuse to install on a case-sensitive drive, but it also requires to install on your boot drive as well! Srsly?
Well, there's a solution. I've just stumbled upon this, and I'm really anxious to share it. I've forked the code to update it for CS6.
Prerequisites
-
Xcode
You can install it from AppStore.
-
Command Line Tools for Xcode.
You can install it from Xcode's
Preferences
->Downloads
.
A step-by-step installation instructions
-
Create a
.sparsebundle
pseudo-image to install CS6:mkdir -p ~/Stuff/Adobe cd ~/Stuff/Adobe hdiutil create -size 15g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname 'Adobe CS6 SparseBundle' -fs 'Journaled HFS+' ~/Stuff/Adobe/Adobe_CS6_SparseBundle.sparsebundle
-
Mount the newly created image and create a
/Adobe
directory insideopen ~/Stuff/Adobe/Adobe_CS6_SparseBundle.sparsebundle mkdir -p /Volumes/Adobe\ CS6\ SparseBundle/Adobe
-
Create an extra
/Applications/Adobe
folder on the boot drive (we will trick the installer with this temporary directory.)mkdir -p /Applications/Adobe
-
Get the hack, compile it, and run it
OK, at this point you'll need to edit the
Makefile
and set theCS6_INSTALLER_PATH
variable to point to theInstall.app
directory. The current one tries to find it automatically, but it may fail...cd ~/Stuff/Adobe git clone git://github.com/tzvetkoff/adobe_case_sensitive_volumes.git cd adobe_case_sensitive_volumes make sudo make run
-
When asked, select
/Applications/Adobe
for installation directory rather than just/Applications
, but don't click theInstall
button!! Remember, don't click theInstall
button just yet. -
Now, time to do one more hack - remove the
/Applications/Adobe
directory and replace it with a symlink to the/Adobe
directory from the SparseBundle.rm -rf /Applications/Adobe ln -s /Volumes/Adobe\ CS6\ SparseBundle/Adobe/ /Applications/Adobe
-
Now click the
Install
button -
You can now safely delete the intermediate files and probably move the SparseBundle somewhere easier to mount by just clicking it (the Desktop, probably?)
mv ~/Stuff/Adobe/Adobe_CS6_SparseBundle.sparsebundle ~/Desktop/Adobe_CS6_SparseBundle.sparsebundle rm -rf ~/Stuff/Adobe
-
That's it!
Just remember that you'll need to mount the SparseBundle every time you need to use Adobe's products.
Thanks
lokkju, for writing that awesome article and code to start from