How to tell if Rosetta is installed
 

The title is the question. Thanks.

What version of OS X?

Trevor

Sorry - 10.6.1.

I have looked for the name itself, and can't find it, so am wondering if there is another clue somewhere.

Thanks.

Rosetta is a separate install in 10.6, and the Snow Leopard installer asks you early in the install setup if you want to install Rosetta.
Did you install it yet?

A good way to find out if your have Rosetta installed, is to try an app that needs it...
I have AppleWorks, which very nicely asks if you want to install Rosetta, or it just works, and you know that you have Rosetta.

Well ... I didn't install it explicitly from the install DVD. And I do have Appleworks 6, but don't recall (I am getting old, after all) it asking me to install when I ran it. So I guess I appear to have it, but don't have direct proof (except for Appleworks functioning).

I assume that installing it from the DVD again wouldn't hurt. Would it?

I don't know, it *might* downgrade the version of Rosetta if there were updates specific to Rosetta in 10.6.1 (I'm assuming here that the version of Snow Leopard DVD that you have installs 10.6.nothing.)

Trevor

You can check to see if Rosetta is running by looking at all the processes in Activity Monitor. It will clearly say Rosetta if I recall. It may be loaded on demand, like when you start Apple Works. I am not really sure on that. I have no way to try it at the moment.

It only shows up in Activity Monitor if it's running; that is, only if you're running a PPC application (by which time you already know if it's installed).

To find out if, and if so when, you installed Rosetta, enter the following command:

OK, that's maybe a little cutesy. Shorter:

If you didn't install Rosetta, the system will ask you if you want to install it the first time you try to run a PPC app. The OS will then download the package with Software Update. There is no need to manually install it from the DVD.

Thanks - I did, it is installed. I guess I will let the "how?" disappear into the mists. Further. :rolleyes:

Easiest way
 

Go to System preferences panel, there, you'll find the "applications update icon" (not sure of the name cause my system is in french but you should find it easily) clic it, then clic on the "installed applications" and there you are, a list of all installed applications on your computer. You'll even see the date of installation and the app version.

Well I upgraded my machine from 10.4 to 10.6. Rosetta is obviously installed, yet it doesn't show up in the list suggested by proy70.

No, that 'Installed Applications' list is only for applications that you have installed through Software Update. That doesn't show anything about Rosetta if you used other methods to install, such as a custom install with the OS X installer DVD.

Thanks for the code!
 

I do like it when people who know more than me make my life easier! Thanks!

Thanks ganbustein for providing that command!

I'm having my own problems with Rosetta. Ran the second Terminal command above, and it says I have Rosetta installed, which I knew, because I have installed it from the Snow Leopard DVD, twice.

The problem is that all of my apps, except Skype, have "Open using Rosetta" grayed out in the Get Info window. Can't check that box at all. Skype, even though the box is checked, still runs as an Intel app, I think, because there's no sign of Rosetta when I launch it and look in Activity Monitor.

Here's the main motivation behind all of this: I am trying to run a single PPC app from way back. Finder says the app is PPC, but when I "Show Package Contents" there's an app underneath which Finder says is Classic. Neither of them give me the option of "Open using Rosetta".

So, maybe two problems here, but probably linked. Help would be appreciated.

1. Are you sure the apps have Universal code? If they are only Intel, then you can't run them in Rosetta, so that option would be grey.

2. An old PPC app should only run in Rosetta without any config. What happens when you launch it? Any messages in Console?

3. This is Snow Leopard, right? And not Lion?

4. A better way to check is to use Activity Monitor to show you whether the process is PPC or Intel. You may need to add a column in the display to show this.

1) Good point. I was assuming that Intel-only apps would not have the Rosetta checkbox at all, and Universal apps would always have the Rosetta box.

Time Machine: Universal - grayed out box.
TextEdit: Intel - no box.
System Preferences: Universal - no box.
Safari: Intel - grayed out box.
Skype: Universal - box which can be toggled.

Apple have seemingly contradicted themselves here.


2) Crash on launch, and I get the "…quit unexpectedly" dialog box.


3) Yes, 10.6.8, but running on my Mac mini which is "Lion-only" according to Apple. Used instadmg to build it. That whole process can be found in another thread, if anyone is interested.


4) Dang, forgot about that. Just checked, and it is showing as PowerPC.

So, Skype proves that Rosetta is installed, is working, and can be accessed, but why can none of my other Universal apps utilize it?

May be they are crashing for some other, non-Rosetta reason?

What does the crash log indicate?

According to my receipts folder Rosetta is not installed. Yet various PPC programs run fine.

Digging deeper, the core program seems to be /usr/libexec/oah/translate ?

Okay, figured it out as I was going to dinner. "Open using Rosetta" is dependent upon having "Open in 32-bit mode" checked first. That's not immediately obvious based on the way it's visually represented in "Get Info", especially because "Locked" is directly beneath the two, and that option is not dependent on either of the above having been checked.

Glad that mystery has been solved.

I'm guessing that the app I want to run simply does not run in Snow Leopard (it's from the Panther days), and that's okay, but why would I not even get an option to try and run it in Rosetta? Perhaps it's so old that the system doesn't know what to do with it.

In a nutshell:

By the way, if anybody at Aspyr is reading this, Feral is "The Greatest Mac publisher on Earth, ever."

…actually, it kind of varies based on where Brad Oliver is working at the moment.

Ha Ha.

I also see Rosetta listed within /Library/Receipts/InstallHistory.plist (Snow Leopard). Not sure about Lion.

Can you tell us what app that you are really interested in?
You cut off the line near the top of the log that tells what app actually crashed.

And, doesn't really matter what you'll find about rosetta in Lion. There's no support in Lion for rosetta, so PPC apps have no chance of running in any case.

Then you're off in uncharted territory. Just because you've managed to trick the installer into installing something it didn't want to install doesn't mean it'll work. The installer may have had very good reasons for telling you "no" when you asked it straight up. "Working" is not an all or nothing thing. It may be that some things work and others don't. The installer would have said "no" if it knows that not everything works; you may have just found one of the things that doesn't.

And "the web told me it'll work" doesn't mean it'll work.

The rule I follow is: Never lie to your computer. Bad things tend to happen when you do.

Didn't really have to trick the installer. Just built the image with instadmg, mostly because I have only 1 Mac, and cloned it onto a partition. It booted up fine, and has run well for the past few days / weeks, but as you noted, it's not all or nothing.

Found some hardware performance problem areas which I'm going to address in separate threads, one of which has already been solved, but overall, very happy to have access to Snow Leopard again. Too many things in Lion which irk me, and I would be loath to make it my home.

Really a shame that Apple seem to have changed their tactics with regard to OS releases and hardware compatibility. Cutting off Snow Leopard so abruptly, I think, was a mistake.