How to install Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Linux Kubuntu 7.04

(click screenshot for full size)

Introduction

The basic idea with this procedure is to take a working Windows Photoshop CS2 installation and "clone" it into the Linux environment. Under Linux, a system called WINE (WINE=Wine Is Not an Emulator) makes it possible to run Windows programs by providing a windows-like environment, complete with file system, registry etc.

Prerequisites

• A Windows PC with a fully functional Adobe Photoshop CS2 installation. To start with a clean installation is recommended.

• A Linux Kubuntu 7.04 installation with any latest updates. The Linux installation may be on a different computer or in dual boot on the same computer as Windows. A dual boot setup makes for easy cloning of a CS2 installation if the two OSes have a common partition on the hard disk. But this is no requirement.

• Wine must be installed on Kubuntu. To do this, start the "Adept Package Manager" from the System menu. Put "wine" in the search field, and check that the package "wine" is installed. If it is not, right-click it and choose "request install", followed by "apply changes".

  

  Alternatively, one can also use the command line/terminal window to install wine:

  $ sudo apt-get update
  password: xxxxxx
  $ sudo apt-get install wine
  

• WinZip is in this procedure used on Windows and Linux and is therefore a prerequisite. One may achieve the same without WinZip, but it makes things easy.

Preparations on Windows

• If you don't have a working installation of CS2 on Windows, install it first. Perform normal program activation according to Adobe installation instructions.

• Install Photoshop Plugins, such as for example the FITS Liberator.

• Start Photoshop and make sure it is operational on Windows, read write a couple of files (FITS, TIFF, ...)

• Once the Photoshop installation has been verified on Windows, use WinZip to make a new ZIP file, and zip the entire file structure under

  C:\Program Files\Adobe\*
  

  into a file called Photoshop_CS2.zip. Make sure you check the "Include subfolders" and "Save full path info" and then click "Add with wildcards":

  

• If you have a dual boot system, store the new Photoshop_CS2.zip file on a partition where it can be read from Kubuntu. If you don't have a dual boot system you can copy it to a CD or use a USB memory stick (the file Photoshop_CS2.zip becomes ~283 MB, size depending on plugins etc.)

• Start the Windows registry editor (Start -> Run... regedit.exe). Browse to

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Adobe
  

  

  Then export this branch to a file called adobe.reg. Notice that by selecting the Win9x/NT4 registry file type option, we create a plain ASCII file instead of unicode, and this saves a bit of trouble on the Linux side.

  

  Save adobe.reg next to the Photoshop_CS2.zip file. It will be needed in Linux.

Linux installation

• Install Windows WinZip on Kubuntu. Just start WINZIP32.EXE under wine using

  $ wine WINZIP32.EXE
  

  ... in the directory where Winzip is found. The normal WinZip installation should succeed with a WinZip icon on the KDE desktop. Later, you can remove WinZip as the Linux Ark program does a similar job, but the fact that WinZip is a Windows program makes life easier in this case, as we shall see in the next step.

• Using WinZip, open the Photoshop_CS2.zip created on Windows, and extract all the files to "C:\". Remember we created the ZIP file with full path info, so this will create files under C:\Program Files\Adobe\*, just like in the original Windows installation.

  

  Note that "C:\" here is the windows file system in the wine environment. Seen from outside wine, the directory corresponds to $HOME/.wine/drive_c

• Import adobe.reg into the wine registry.
  K-menu -> Settings -> Wine Regedit , or simply

  $ wine regedit
  

  In the wine registry editor, use Registry -> Import Registry File ... and browse to adobe.reg and open it. Exit the registry editor.

• Now we have a Linux Photoshop installation!

Running Photoshop CS2 on Linux

• First time execution.
  You may have to set wine in Windows XP mode via K-menu -> Settings -> Wine Configuration

  $ wine "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe"
  

  Note that Photoshop may appear to be hanging during startup, but after 30-60 seconds it should become active and function as normal.

• Second and subsequent times execution.
  After successful first time execution, Photoshop CS2 will have created some new files under

  C:\windows\profiles\[your name]\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings\
  

  In particular, the following file is of interest: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Prefs.psp

  NOTE: This file must be deleted before each run of Photoshop CS2, or else the startup will fail with an error saying

  Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error.
  Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable
  

  You can see a screenshot of this situation here.

  To recover from this error you have to delete Adobe Photoshop CS2 Prefs.psp as mentioned.

• Make a desktop icon
  To start photoshop, you can make a text file called Photoshop.desktop and put it in your home desktop folder, it could look something like this:

  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Name=Adobe Photoshop CS2
  Comment=Adobe Photoshop CS2
  GenericName=Graphics
  Exec=wine "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe"
  Terminal=false
  X-MultipleArgs=false
  Type=Application
  Icon=/etc/cs2.png
  StartupNotify=true

  If you are a bit more clever, the desktop icon could point to a shell script that deletes the offending Adobe Photoshop CS2 Prefs.psp before it actually starts Photoshop. Of course, the cs2.png file mentioned, should provide a suitable Photoshop CS2 desktop Icon such as for example