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Running Photoshop CS2 in Linux

By Studge | February 23, 2008

Thanks to recent advances with Wine, it is now very easy to run Photoshop in Linux - but it’s not foolproof yet. This tutorial was performed on a Pentium 4 desktop running Fedora 8 with Wine 0.9.55 and Adobe Photoshop CS2.

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:

Photoshop in Linux 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.

Topics: Linux, Web Design

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6 Comments »

Comment by Renegadeabe
2008-05-05 10:19:09

Thanks for the howto.
I got CS2 running on my linux box but I was wondering why it wouldnt let me run cs2 on an account that is not part of admin. I use kubuntu but we pretty much did the same installation steps.
Just wondering if you had any clue as to why that is.

Thanks

Comment by Studge
2008-05-05 10:21:19

You may need to add that user to the Wine group. I use Fedora and this wasn’t an issue.

 
 
Comment by Renegadeabe
2008-05-05 10:23:00

wow talk about a fast response!
lol thanks Ill definitely check it out in the office tomorrow

Comment by Studge
2008-05-05 10:28:31

Actually, did you install Photoshop as a privileged user? I did this once and could only run the program if I was logged in as that user. I had to install Photoshop with my regular user account in order to use it properly.

Comment by Renegadeabe
2008-05-09 01:33:20

Actually I did at first install it with the privileged account and thats when I found out I couldn’t use it so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it using the non-privileged account and it still gave me the same problem.

I still havent had time to return to the user’s pc but Ill do so this week and let you know.

Thank again

 
 
 
Comment by Renegadeabe
2008-05-09 09:11:23

Well I returned today to the PC and unfortunately I couldn’t find any wine group in Kubuntu’s groups.

For now I have the user part of the admin group as well.
She doesnt know too much about Linux so I dont know if thats a good thing or a bad thing.
I just told her not to run anything that asks for a password and call me before hand.
heheh dangerous workaround.

Anyway if you can shed more light by sharing any other ideas Id more than appreciate it.
but thanks either way, since your blog’s really commendable.

 
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