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Rosetta and Lion - Is there a solution?

I'm considering upgrading to Lion, mostly due to the fact it has drivers for Nvidia's 500 Series, so ATY_Init will be happy with it.

But, one problem... No rosetta, and a lot of the programs I use or test are not universal binary (Primarily Cocoa PPC or Carbon). So that raises the issue.


How would I go about getting Rosetta on to Lion? I'm assuming that it wouldn't be as simple as copying some Frameworks and Kexts... Do any solutions exist for this yet, like hacks or mods, or is it impossible? (Or too soon?)

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 2:30 AM

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181 replies

Jul 21, 2011 2:40 AM in response to Chris J Witt

Rosetta will not be supported.


If you're dead-set on having your cake and eating it, too, your only option is to partition your drive, install 10.6 on the new partition, and upgrade it to Lion, leaving one Lion partition, and one Snow Leopard partition. Developers have had five years to update their software to the new architecture; software that old would likely be unstable, possibly insecure on a new OS, anyway.

Jul 24, 2011 11:29 AM in response to Csound1

Keep in mind that it's not as simple as 'selling Rosetta as it was in Snow Leopard'.


Rosetta is deeply hooked into the OS, and I am sure that a lot of these hooks broke in Lion. So what you are really asking Apple to do is to maintain an old piece of software for legacy purposes to keep up with the latest OS. In turn, this could slow down development of new and amazing things in Mac OS X.


While I am also not happy about leaving certain programs back, I still rather have Apple focused on the future of Mac OS X.

Jul 24, 2011 11:33 AM in response to tokyobeing

tokyobeing wrote:


snip


So what you are really asking Apple to do is to maintain an old piece of software for legacy purposes to keep up with the latest OS. In turn, this could slow down development of new and amazing things in Mac OS X.


snip

I think you are replying to the wrong post, I am not asking Apple to do anything with Rosetta (never use it) merely pointing out that Rosetta is not written or sold by Apple.

Jul 24, 2011 12:09 PM in response to Chris J Witt

Don't upgrade unless you have no choice. If you depend on PPC apps, then you must dual boot, buy a G5, or don't upgrade.


Anyways, 95% of the software for Mac in 2011 is either Intel only or Universal already. But I too have many older apps, but they never really worked well with Rosetta anyways. About 2 months ago I found the perfect solution... I bought a used Dual Core G5 with 8GB of RAM and the 7800GT PCIE and I can run everything I want at full native speed. This is a must in a production environment with legacy software.


Even under Rosetta, my Adobe CS2 and older versions of Final Cut suck big time and my ibook can't handle them anymore. So if you are like me, it is cheaper to find a good used dual or quad core G5 and run all those apps at native speeds (unless Rosetta worked well for you). It is cheaper than buying the latest Adobe Creative suite and Office 2011 anyways.


And many people tell me I'm stupid for using old software, but I have a 2011 iMac and just wasted $300 on the new Final Cut Pro X (trying to process a refund right now)... My old Final Cut 7 is a million times better and works great on that G5 too. I also use Logic Studio 9, and on the G5 it is smoother, on this new iMac, sometimes it tells me there is not enough memory to playback 14-20 tracks and crashes (even in 64 bit mode using the Intel Native version). Upon re-opening it, it works (sometimes). Never crashed once on the G5.


Now since I installed Lion on my new iMac, it is useless for my production environment... period (since Rosetta is gone). I don't want to buy office 2011 and upgrade all my current apps for $1000's of dollars. Even if I revert back to Snow Leopard and use Rosetta, the apps I mentioned are slow anyways, and often freeze or crash.


So I got a $400 G5 that works perfect for me and a $1500 iMac that's good for web browsing and iLife 11. (Well, at least video encoding with the latest Handbrake is more useful on this new i5 iMac, that is the only thing I can use it for daily)

Sep 25, 2011 10:00 PM in response to Allan Eckert

Yeah, but I'll feel better once my ya-ya's are out. And also it's less of a guilt trip for when I have to bootcamp into Windows.


It is, though, odd that they didn't at least provide a special extention which can allow for an instance of rosetta to be loaded. It might take more memory to have the code running outside of native OSX, but at least the option is still there.

Sep 26, 2011 7:15 AM in response to cignet

It appears that Apple thinks the five year extension that Rosetta has already given to PPC code is sifficient for the migration over to Intel code instead.


The big problems is that there are a couple of vendors who have not removed the PPC code from their product even after five years. I think that they will now finially see the light when they start losing market share.


Besides after I did the migration shortly before Lion came out I found that the new products are so much better I am actually glad I made the migration over.


Allan

Rosetta and Lion - Is there a solution?

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