Adobe CS3 Install Fails with Network Home
Posted in Mac OS X, System Administration on 06/19/2007 04:18 pm by jmccune 
Working at the math department, I haven’t had many encounters with Adobe applications. We recently bought concurrent licenses for Adobe CS3, and I’ve been spending this morning installing it, sifting out all of the files into a Package Maker project and otherwise preparing it for distribution.
The Adobe installer software is extremely poor quality. Having little experience with Adobe installers, I logged into a network home directory based administrative account and fired up the installer. After typing the adminstrative password, the installer immediately complained; “Setup has encountered an error and cannot continue. Contact Adobe Customer Support for assistance.”
There’s no error message in /Library/Logs/Adobe, the Console, or other system logs. There no mention of this problem in the README file shipping with the installation media.
The solution is relatively simple. You have to install this software using a local administrative account, not one with a network home directory.
Also, beware… While browsing the Adobe knowledge base, I ran across the article titled “Can’t install Adobe CS to case-sensitive HFS+ volumes.” Their solution is to re-format the volume.
09/19/2007 at 3:35 pm
Hi mate,
Can you tell me what you mean by administrative account? I believe I am running that, as its my only mac account (local). If you could email me or indicate to me when you reply to this blog comment, i would really appreciate.
Thanks
D
09/19/2007 at 3:45 pm
From http://developer.apple.com/internet/security/securityintro.html under “Administrative Accounts”
The first account created on a Mac OS X system is an administrative account. If possible, this account should not be the account you commonly use; it should be reserved for making changes to the system and installing system-wide applications. After installing Mac OS X, go into the Users item in System Preferences create a new account without administrative access. For your common tasks, log in as that user.