Running Adobe CS3 on macOS Sierra

I’ve been running a rather old version of Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) successfully on Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra.

With each upgrade, I need to run this odd procedure to trick the programs into thinking an old version of Java exists. Apparently they don’t really need it, but they just need to see the files are where they expect at launch. So, we just create these empty files.

From Terminal:

sudo mkdir -p /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk
sudo mkdir -p /System/Library/Java/Support/Deploy.bundle

This is not allowed by default since OSX 10.11 because of the new “System Integrity Protection.”

To enable or disable System Integrity Protection, you must boot to Recovery OS and run the “csrutil” command from the Terminal.

1. Boot to Recovery OS by restarting your machine and holding down the Command and R keys at startup.
2. Launch Terminal from the Utilities menu.
3. Type csrutil disable and hit enter.
4. Type reboot and hit enter.

After reboot you can create the two files above.

I have also had to repair the license at one point when copying the software to a new mac.

There is a license recovery tool provided by Adobe but it doesn’t work as expected on the newer mac versions. Once you mount the image, go to Terminal and run it like this:

cd /Volumes/LicenseRecovery\ 11.6.1/LicenseRecovery/
sudo python LicenseRecover.py