Adobe Photoshop CS3 on Mac OS X Case Sensitive Partitions

With the release of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple made it easier for people to use a case-sensitive file system. People who chose to go with the case-sensitive file system found that they couldn't install Adobe CS3 products at all. When you pop in the disc and start the installation, it immediately says that you can't install it yet after a quick Google Search, you'll find John Nack's blog post that originally claims CS3 is good to for Leopard. The comments on that post go into great detail about why case-sensitive file systems are important and desired by users and why John Nack thinks otherwise. After several hours, I got it working. Scroll down to skip to the instructions.

Anyway, fortunately for me, I had a disk image of my Tiger installation with Photoshop CS3 installed and was able to copy over the files without having to go through the installation. But when you try to launch Photoshop, it immediately crashes. I decided to go on the mission of fixing this problem so that I can avoid studying for my finals, because well, school sucks.

So I checked out the system log in Console and Photoshop logs the full path of the files it's trying to access but can't find. In the end, there were a 65 files/folders that needed to have their case changed (most were "resources" to "Resources", "a" to "A", etc.) To my surprise, it worked! Photoshop launches and runs!

After I got it to work, it was complaining about a missing file in Application Support, and after running a DTrace and looking at the all the syscalls, I found that it was actually looking for "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" and all I had to do to fix that was copy that over from my Tiger disk image.

Fortunately for you guys, you don't have to go through the same process as me. I've generated a bash script to automate all the case changes. So for those of you who have a backed up copy of Photoshop and the /Library folder, just follow these steps and you'll be set.

1. From your backed up data, copy over "old_disk_image/Library/Application Support/Adobe" to "/Library/Application Support/Adobe"
2. Copy over "old_disk_image/Library/Application Support/FLEXnet Publisher" to "/Library/Application Support/FLEXnet Publisher" (this was mentioned in John Nack's blog comments and I'm not sure if it's actually apart of Adobe's software or not but I copied it over)
   
3. Copy over "old_disk_image/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" to "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" (you may or may not already have the ScriptingAdditions folder, if not, just create it)
   
4. Copy over "old_disk_image/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3" to "/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3"
5. Download this script (it renames the 65 files/folders that need to be changed)
6. Open the Terminal Application
   
7. Type "sh ~/Downloads/PhotoshopCS3CaseFixer.sh" and push enter (download path may vary if you changed the default)
8. Now go ahead and launch Photoshop and you should be set to go

This should get Photoshop up and running, but since I haven't used every feature of Photoshop, I'm not sure if there are any other files that have the case-sensitivity issue. So if it breaks for me, I'll update this post.

Hopefully Adobe will use this as the first steps to fixing their software so that it works on case-sensitive file systems.