Posted on January 7, 2010 at 4:16 pm

Installing Rosetta on Snow Leopard

I was trying to use the flare actionscript decomplier, which I’d never used since I upgraded to Snow Leopard about a month ago. The OSX version of flare is a PPC binary and needs Rosetta to run. Unfortunately, since flare is a command line application, it just spits out a message (“You need the Rosetta software to run flare. The Rosetta installer is in Optional Installs on your Mac OS X installation disc.“) and exits. GUI applications trigger a dialog prompting you to download and install Rosetta. My Snow Leopard upgrade disk is at home and I don’t want to wait until evening to install Rosetta off the disk. So, I tried searching for a link to the Rosetta installer on the web, without any success. The only other recourse was to find a PPC built application to install and run (and eventually uninstall after Rosetta was installed) to trigger the installer dialog. After a little bit of searching, I finally managed to find PPC binaries from the Folding@home project. I installed it, and got the dialog to install Rosetta, which incidentally was only a 2MB download. I wish there was an easier way to download the Rosetta installer straight from the apple website.

Tags:, ,

8 Responses to “Installing Rosetta on Snow Leopard”

  1. A.S on July 24th, 2010 at 12:33 PM says:

    /you need to write more! It’s necessary!!

  2. Victor Reutenauer on August 8th, 2010 at 1:50 AM says:

    Thank you,just had the same problem to use gnuplot in command line.

    Victor

  3. Unearthed on October 1st, 2010 at 10:51 PM says:

    You need to start writing again! I thought you already had!

  4. J on April 28th, 2011 at 8:13 AM says:

    Thank you! You are awesome. I had this exact same problem as well.

  5. confussed on April 29th, 2011 at 5:42 AM says:

    i just bought the new mac book pro and i need to install rosetta.. it says on the apple website “If your computer is connected to the Internet: Click the Install button in the Rosetta dialog. Rosetta will be downloaded and installed for you.” whats the rosetta dialog??” and how do i get rosseta??

  6. Craig on August 4th, 2011 at 10:05 AM says:

    Thanks! I had this exact same problem and didn’t know of any PPC apps offhand that I could install to trigger the dialog box.

    Cheers..
    Craig

  7. Daniel on October 18th, 2011 at 6:01 PM says:

    Thanks. Really helpful.
    Regards

  8. Ben on November 25th, 2011 at 3:50 PM says:

    Apple will never make things simple!

Leave a Reply