Rosetta and Mountain Lion

Only way I know of to do so:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Install Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server in a virtual machine, but it's very expensive. If your Mac had 10.8 or 10.7 preinstalled, you can't install it in your hard disk. If not, make a partition and install Snow Leopard on this partition

Options:

1. Reinstall your old OS X (if you upgraded);

2. Either partition your hard drive or attach an external hard drive and install Snow Leopard on it. You can then "dual-boot" into Snow Leopard when you want to run your CD (if your MBP will support Snow Leopard);

3. The solution I use: Install Snow Leopard into Parallels 7 (tip of the hat to wjosten):

[click on image to enlarge]

Full Snow Leopard installations instructions:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Snow Leopard Server is much easier to install, but much more expensive to purchase. Snow Leopard (client) only has to be installed once into Parallels and installation help is available at the linked thread.

You must chose the pain in your butt that pleases you most! 🙂

I advise: Drop the Class! 😁

Alternatively you might want to install Parallels Desktop or VirtualBox and run MS Windows virtually on your Mac. That will allow you to use the PC side of the software on your text book CD in stead of the Legacy PowerPC Mac software.

If I were to copy my current drive to an external drive with SuperDuper, and then upgrade to Lion, could I then boot into the old drive from my upgraded MacBook Pro and use Rosetta? I confess that there is nothing that seems to me so mission critical in Lion that the upgrade is even now essential: but it would be convenient nonetheless.

I am assuming your current drive is Snow Leopard. Also, I am assuming that when you installed it you selected the Option/Customize install of Rosetta, since you appear to be alreadying using PowerPC apps.

While I have no personal experience with SuperDuper, it appears that this process should work to create a "dual-boot" system for you to use.

So, even post-Lion, this would make a few of those legacy Apps functional via Rosetta? That is splendid. Is there any way to achieve this without dual boot and without partition of the mother drive?

Yes, with one partition as Lion and the other partition continuing to be Snow Leopard, this is the dual-boot approach.

The other approach is to install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels in Lion/Mt. Lion and have both available concurrently. The link to the installation instructions is listed in my post above:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

What PowerPC apps do you hope to continue to run?

Thank you for this. Parallels sounds best, but I've not used it much. My fear is it will overly slow my system down & overly constrict the available HD space. Do either of these fears ring true to you? If so, then despite the attractiveness of concurrent availability, I'll need to go the dual-boot approach...

Thanks again for the benefit of your judgment.

I use Parallels 8 to run Windows XP with no problem - not much of ahard drive hog, won't slow down your machine (if you've at least 8GB of RAM), etc. Haven't tried the SL install via Parallels as I've updated all of the software that was PPC a long while back.

Just my 2¢...

Clinton

sers wrote:

...My fear is it will overly slow my system down & overly constrict the available HD space. Do either of these fears ring true to you?...

On my 2011 Mac Mini (5,1) with 2.3 GHz Core i5 with 8 GB RAM, I notice no slowdown on my other concurrently running Mac OS X Lion based programs.

On my 2009 MacBook Pro (5,5) with 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM, I notice that it is slowing down concurrently running programs, but I am confident that an upgrade to 8 GB RAM would solve this problem.

After you install Snow Leopard into Parallels, you will find a Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file in ~/Documents/Parallels/ at about 15GB large. This file will increase as you install more applications into Snow Leopard.

I always advise everyone to NOT save data within the virtual environment, but use the Shared Folder and/or Apple File Sharing to store, access and modify data within your real Lion/Mt. Lion environment (which presumably is also backed up by Time Machine or whatever other system you use for backup). So this will not increase the size of your Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file.

I have been advised that Eudora is an example of a PowerPC program that must store its data within the virtualized SL environment; but I do not personally use that program.

You can always try the 14 day trial version of Parallels and if you do not like it, you can easily delete the Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file to restore the space to your hard drive:

http://trial.parallels.com/index.php?lang=en&terr=us

Also, you can move the Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file to an external hard drive, double click it from there to install into Parallels (Click on NEW when the dialog box appears) and then delete the old file to restore your primary hard disk space. However DO NOT disconnect the external hard drive when Parallels is running. I also strongly advise keeping a backup copy of the original Mac OS X Snow Leopard.pvm file stored somewhere, so that you do not have to repeat the installation process if corruption arises.

Good luck!