1. Install Wine

To install Wine in Fedora, we will use yum. However, for other distributions, it should be widely available in your respective package manager or you can install from source.

[root@localhost ~]# yum install wine*

2. Install Photoshop

I installed Photoshop from the CD. I attempted to run the setup files from Nautilus, but it failed and I continued the rest of the installation from the command line. My CD was auto-mounted in the /media/Photoshop CS2/ folder so I will navigate there to open the setup file. Be sure not to run the installation as root.

[user@localhost ~]$ cd "/media/Photoshop CS2"
[user@localhost ~]$ wine Setup.exe

Now the normal Photoshop setup routine will initiate. I selected my region and continued. Next I was prompted for Gecko integration. This is a result of using Wine and is required by the Adobe license screen to display an HTML version of the license in the program window. I allowed it to install the integration, but it never completed. I canceled the integration and it only affected the next screen that asks me to agree to the license – by not displaying the text of the license. This is fine, so I selected Agree to continue on. From here on out you can continue with the installation as you would on a Windows machine.

3. Execution

Everything in the installation went smoothly and didn’t garner any more attention than had I installed it on a regular PC running Windows. To run Photoshop, I need to locate the executable and run it with Wine – just as we ran the setup executable with Wine. When using Wine, it will create a folder that represents the C: Drive in Windows. On a Fedora machine, this is /home/user/.wine/drive_c/ and contains a Program Files directory.

[user@localhost ~]$ cd "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/"
[user@localhost ~]$ wine Photoshop.exe

This initiated and started Photoshop just fine. I messed around with a few images and was pleased with the installation. My next move was to create a menu shortcut for launching Photoshop. I did this and then ran it again to insure my menu entry worked right and was presented with the following error:

I found that this is an error that occurs in a Windows installation of Photoshop when there is an issue with the preferences. My current workaround is to wrap the Wine command to execute Photoshop in a shell script that will delete the preference file after Photoshop is closed. This means that any saved preferences will be lost each time Photoshop is used. Hopefully I can find out what is precisely going on here soon and come up with a more eloquent solution, but this will have to do in the meantime. Here is the contents of photoshop.sh which I store in my /home/user/bin folder for easy execution:

#!/bin/bash
wine "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Photoshop.exe"
rm "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/path/Application Data/Adobe/\
Photoshop/9.0/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Prefs.psp"

Be sure the set the script to executable after you write it with:

[user@localhost bin]$ chmod +x photoshop.sh

Now you can create a menu entry or launcher that executes this script.