10.6: Disable and enable Rosetta via Terminal

rosetta-apple.pngWant to stop using Rosetta before running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? This handy tip shows how to enable and disable it from the Terminal in Mac OS X 10.6.x, no reboot required.


Comments

3 responses to “10.6: Disable and enable Rosetta via Terminal”

  1. I just tried the tip’s terminal code to stop Rosetta and tried to start a PowerPC app (Appleworks) and it asked me if I wanted to install Rosetta. I then ran the terminal code to start Rosetta, then restarted Appleworks without a hitch.

  2. I should make it clear — you don’t really need to use the Terminal code to start Rosetta. After you click Install Rosetta, it will start automatically when you attempt to launch a PowerPC application the first time after boot up.
    You really only need this tip if you want to disable it for some reason (which I did, in order to perform some testing duties at work).

    1. Serif / I’ve been a happy Mac user pretty much as soon as OS X bcmeae available about 10 years ago. Since then I’ve bought regular updates to hardware and always updated software as new releases of OS X have appeared. The lack of Rosetta in Lion is quite a problem for me. I’ll update to Lion on my work iMac and Macbook but my shiny new i7 iMac that is my main home machine will remain at 10.6.x because I regularly play a certain multiplayer game from Blizzard that is PPC only and for which I’ve never managed to get the Windows version running properly in a virtual environment using any combination of Parallels, VMWare, Windows 7 and Windows XP.I’d happily pay for a commercial update of Rosetta or maybe there is an opening in the market for someone to write a converter to take a PPC application and rewrite it as x86? With the improvements to hardware speed since the switch to Intel was made, it wouldn’t even have to be a particularly efficient conversion for legacy applications to run acceptably.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.