I just reinstalled my computer, and was having issues: After installing Adobe Creative Suite 4, the Updater (which generally updates software _too_ frequently) checked for updates and then kept proclaiming that none were available.
Since my install DVDs were very old, I didn’t believe this, and more recent updates were in fact available on the web. This bothered me for a while, so I poked around a bit. Much to my chagrin, Apple seems to have removed ktrace (which itself was a poor replacement for strace) from Snow Leopard, and replaced it by dtrace, which seems to be powerful, but way harder to use. Luckily, they’ve added Instruments.app, which is a pretty cool graphical tool that can be used to trace any app.
Anyway, I ran a filesystem trace on Adobe Updater. Turns out that the default permissions on “/Library/Application Support/Adobe” are not set correctly. Or maybe they are set correctly, and the Updater expects the incorrect permissions. At any rate you can get Adobe CS4 Updater to work with Snow Leopard as follows. Before any changes are made, you should see the following line if you run this from the command-line. (type the stuff after the $ sign.) Make sure to include the quotes; they’re important.
terrance:~ vijayp$ ls -ald "/Library/Application Support/Adobe"
drwxr-xr-x 43 root admin 1462 Dec 1 23:25 Adobe/
The updater seems to require admin write permissions. Fix this as follows (you will have to enter your login password):
terrance:~ vijayp$ sudo chmod g+w "/Library/Application Support/Adobe"
Password:
terrance:~ vijayp$ ls -ald "/Library/Application Support/Adobe"
drwxrwxr-x 43 root admin 1462 Dec 2 00:25 Adobe/
(note that the quotes are important)
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