A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
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25 May 2023
Migrating to a new chip architecture has proven more challenging than upgrading to a new operating system. We've done this before, moving to a PowerPC architecture and then an Intel architecture and we didn't break a sweat. Moving to Apple Silicon, however, has required more patience.
We mentioned previously that our plan was to run the default system for a while to make sure all the bells rang and the whistles whistled. Then we were going to use Migration Assistant to duplicate our current environment on the new box.
Well, yes and no.
We've now spent a week replicating our Monterey system on Ventura and it hasn't been fun. It isn't so much the difference in operating systems as it is the CPU architectures.
The old code isn't optimized for Apple silicon so we're moving to Homebrew installations of ARM code for apache, PHP8, MySQL 8 and ImageMagick 7 with Perlmagick.
At least with our Adobe installations there was someone to chat with to get a clue what to do. And to its credit, the company emailed and even phoned us to make sure we were able to resolve the issue.
Otherwise it's been a week of trying error more than trial and error. But today's stories were all published from the M2 for the first time.
We don't regret that decision. Not at all. Because we have a lot of stuff it would take decades to recreate on a new machine.
But we do wish we had known that strategy wouldn't work with Adobe's Creative Cloud applications.
We won't speculate why but let's just say we've observed that the installations are tied to particular machines. Period.
We needed a pristine system for the installs.
You are perfectly free to install the applications on as many machines as you like. But you can only activate two of them and you can only run an application on one at a time.
Which we find perfectly reasonable because, after all, we've only got two hands. And usually one is occupied with a mouse.
The catch is that on a new machine, you have to start with a clean slate. No Migration Assistant (someone should tell Apple).
So there we were trying to launch Creative Cloud and failing, then deleting it and trying to install it and failing with an Error 1.
Was the server down? It happens. We opened a chat session and asked just that. But our question wasn't in the script.
In fact, the call center's chat crew (and we chatted with at least three of them over the weekend) wasn't much interested in asking us about our installation at all.
Instead, every one of them asked if they could log into our system to fix things.
No, absolutely not.
So they described at least three ways to get Creative Cloud to install. None of which worked. But, thinking it over, we divined what they were after. Without actually telling us.
We needed a pristine system for the installs. That was the trick. And manually deleting Adobe applications with AppCleaner wasn't going to get it for us.
We had to use Adobe's Cleaner app that requires Rosetta. And which consequently threw repeated errors at us about a package that was not authorized or some such. We just kept clicking OK until all the Adobe stuff we had migrated had been stripped from our drive.
Then Creative Cloud installed without a problem and we were able to use it to install a few applications we needed right away.
Piece of cake.