Installing Adobe CC on case-sensitive drives (Mac OS X)

DISCONTINUED, since it seems that with new MacOS it became impossible to know which MacOS X API let you get disk informations and I don't have anymore a Mac, I'm really SORRY for Adobe users, if for any case you have a spare Mac that is able to run latest MacOS X we could try to figure out how to do it

Well, everybody knows that Adobe are a [censored] company. Their products are the defacto standard for image/video editing and designing, but their codebase really suck. No excuses.

The problem addressed here is that Creative Studio™ refuses to install on a case-sensitive drive on Mac OS X. And it doesn't just refuse to install on a case-sensitive drive, but it also requires to install on your boot drive as well! Srsly?

Well, there's a solution. @tzvetkoff made a fork of this, after trying I found that his code was unmantained and was working only for Adobe CS6 and for old Apple Mac OS X versions.

I've forked the code to update it for CC (Creative Cloud) and for make it more easy to use on new architectures, maybe someone will need it.

One another interesting thing was that his code wasn't working for new Mac OS X since Apple deprecated support for i386 kernel, so fix this issue would had its advantages.

Prerequisites

1. Xcode

   You can install it from Apple AppStore.

2. Command Line Tools for Xcode.

   You can install it from terminal launching sudo xcode-select --install

   Alternatively you can install it from Xcode's Preferences -> Downloads.

A step-by-step installation instructions

1. Create a .sparsebundle pseudo-image to install CC inside it:

   mkdir -p ~/Documents/Adobe
   cd ~/Documents/Adobe
   hdiutil create -size 30g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname 'AdobeCC' -fs 'Journaled HFS+' ~/Documents/Adobe/AdobeCC.sparsebundle

2. Mount the newly created image and create a /Adobe directory inside

   open ~/Documents/Adobe/AdobeCC.sparsebundle
   mkdir -p /Volumes/AdobeCC/Adobe

3. Create an extra /Applications/Adobe folder on the boot drive (we will trick the installer with this temporary directory.)

   mkdir -p /Applications/Adobe

4. Get the hack, compile it, and run it

   OK, at this point you'll need to edit the Makefile and set the CS6_INSTALLER_PATH variable to point to the Install.app directory. The current one tries to find it automatically, but it may fail...

   cd ~/Documents/Adobe
   git clone https://github.com/RubensRainelli/adobe_case_sensitive_volumes.git
   cd adobe_case_sensitive_volumes
   make
   sudo make run

5. When asked, select /Applications/Adobe for installation directory rather than just /Applications, but don't click the Install button!! Remember, don't click the Install button just yet.

6. Now, time to do one more hack - remove the /Applications/Adobe directory and replace it with a symlink to the /Adobe directory from the SparseBundle.

   rm -rf /Applications/Adobe
   ln -s /Volumes/AdobeCC/Adobe/ /Applications/Adobe

7. Now click the Install button

8. You can now safely delete the intermediate files and probably move the SparseBundle somewhere easier to mount by just clicking it (the Desktop, probably?)

   mv ~/Documents/Adobe/AdobeCC.sparsebundle ~/Desktop/AdobeCC.sparsebundle
   rm -rf ~/Documents/Adobe

9. That's it!

   Just remember that you'll need to mount the SparseBundle every time you need to use Adobe's products.

Thanks

lokkju, for writing that awesome article and code

@tzvetkoff for his improved code I've forked and updated for making it compatible with newer Mac OS X and newer Adobe CC

Rashed97 for some other improvements that make it working on newer MacOS X