Claims of Rosetta working

Well, that didn't work! I copied the contents of the Snow Leopard oah folder to the Lion one, after first renaming the RosettaNonGrata file to "RosettaNonGrataOld"--attempting to launch Eudora fails. I then renamed the Snowy RosettaNonGrataSL, and removed the "Old" from the Lion. No go. No matter which of the RosettaNonGrata files I use, If I run the Terminal command:

sudo sysctl kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc

I receive the unhappy answer

kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc: /usr/libexec/oah/RosettaNonGrata

Not the "translate" answer the poster reports getting. So I don't know what the person did, looks like it was something other than copying the stuff from a working Snow Leopard folder!

Francine

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this didn't work. I just spent several hours trying every possible configuration without success. I even used the Rosetta installer from Snow Leopard. I just want to be able to use Tex-Edit Plus!

IMHO He's getting all excited over nothing.

AFAIK How /usr/libexec/oah/translate works is it selects to run the PPC code version of both the program you are attempting to run as well as the system libraries need to load that program.

Last time I checked Lion has no system binaries that have any PPC code in them. Intel and 64 bit Intel code makes up a good part of Lion.

He may be able to get rosetta installed.

But that doesn't mean it will make PPC programs magically work on Lion. Launchd and the various system binaries responsible for launching programs would then have to be forced to use Rosetta when encounting PPC code and there's no guarantee that will actually work and no guarantee the system will then allow Intel code in the system binaries to run the PPC code in the program.

In fact I don't see anything about him then opening a PPC only program and it working on Lion. It's like he's gotten an old 2400 baud modem working in his office yet has not shown him being able to jump on the internet with his Tandy 64 because of that.

how did you manage to install rosetta onto lion?

step by step instructions would be nice.

since The RosettaNonGrata file is the handler-file that prompts 'Launch of "%@" failed: the PowerPC architecture is no longer supported can you just replace lion's RosettaNonGrata file with snow leopard or even leopard's file?

i have a new mac mini on it's way that has lion and i would like to decide if i should keep lion or replace lion with snow leopard or even leopard.

I don't think you'll be able to install Snow Leopard on the new Mac Mini. It requires Lion, and a custom version of Lion at that. As for installing Rosetta, the RosettaNonGrata file is already there. According to the original poster, copying some additional files from Snow Leopard and pasting some code in to Terminal will get it to work, but it doesn't. I think it was a hoax.

ejonesss wrote:

i have a new mac mini on it's way that has lion and i would like to decide if i should keep lion or replace lion with snow leopard or even leopard.

OS X 10.5 (Leopard) certainly will not run on a 2011 Mac. You might be able to do a clean install of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) but only if you have a retail disc. Apple generally does not allow installing of previous OSes on their hardware.

Bluspacecow is right, though. Even if you can get Rosetta installed PPC applications still will not run under Lion because the OS simply does not support it. Period.

Interesting thing Michael.

launchd is the program that's primarly responsible for launching any programs on os x.

On lion this process has no PPC code in it.

You can find out if a particular program has PPC code in it by running the file command.

IE

07:51:55-bluspacecow~$ which launchd

/sbin/launchd

07:55:16-bluspacecow~$ file /sbin/launchd

/sbin/launchd: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures

/sbin/launchd (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

/sbin/launchd (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

Also System Information will list what parts of the software are still PPC. Can't see anything PPC.

I installed Rosetta from the SL optional installs DVD. I only installed it because I needed to install my Final Cut Studio 2 on my new iMac. Ironically, the Final Cut Studio suite worked in Lion on my old machine, but I couldn't install it on the new machine because the Installer was PPC.

So, install Rosetta from SL, check.

Install FCS 2 in Lion, check.

I still can't run older programs in Lion, but somehow the old installer works.

I still can't run older programs in Lion, but somehow the old installer works.

Exactly.

I tried the same thing: old installer will work (FCE 3 installed ok). PPC app will not (tried it with Appleworks).

It should be noted that RosettaNonGrata is not some special file in Lion. It's in Leopard and Snow Leopard, too.

These are commands you can use in Leopard and Snow Leopard to disable, and then re-enable Rosetta. People used this sometimes to determine if a program was PPC only. You'd disable Rosetta just to see if Leopard or SL would tell you that you needed to install Rosetta. Then you'd know it was a PPC app. Then cancel out of installing Rosetta and just re-enable it.

Disable Rosetta:

sudo /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/RosettaNonGrata

Re-enable after it's been installed already:

sudo /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate

Who knows, maybe the second command would activate Rosetta in Lion. I haven't tried it yet, though I did install Rosetta in Lion.

The above commands are one line, they're just wrapping on these forums.

Edit: The translate program of the re-enable Terminal command doesn't exist in Lion. Not even after installing Rosetta, so that must be part of the Leopard and SL install. You may be able to copy them over to Lion in their identical locations and get it to work. But who knows what else may be missing for Rosetta to function.

If you have VMWare Fusion 4.01 then you can load leopard or SL virtual

fred724 wrote:

If you have VMWare Fusion 4.01 then you can load leopard or SL virtual

I thought I read that it's illegal to run SL (don't know about Leopard) unless it's Server version?

As I understand, Fusion announced this feature but then backtracked, all very disappointing as I was hoping to be able to run Rosetta in Lion (via Snow Leopard in Fusion)

http://tinyurl.com/d49hr73

If anyone out there is running SL Server (or SL for that matter) in Fusion with Lion as OS, how fast do programmes work in the virtualization environment?