Fixing Photoshop in Linux

Photoshop 7/CS seems to work pretty well in Linux under Wine emulation but it requires a lot of work arounds.

First: after install you may not be able to load it because of an error regarding full scratch disks. This is actually a problem with the directories and you just have to change the scratch disk to C:\ or whatever as usual, but you can’t do that without loading photoshop. The work around is to go ahead and run the program and as soon as the splash screen appears hold down Alt+Ctrl and that will allow you to register the product if you want or cancel that and then set the scratch disks. Now you are good to go.

If you are STILL having the same error just uninstall through wine and reinstall. The persistent variation of this problem is because of a hard drive change say switching cables around for the SATA drives or something since the install. I’ve read that running the program from within the directory it was installed to will also work, but I am not sure if that’s applicable to WINE.

If you are STILL having the same error make sure you have a small USB drive installed (16, 32, 64 GB is fine) and point one of the scratch disks to that. That is the real workaround you need. A partition on your harddrive of less than a terabyte would also work.

Second: If you try to save a file and get an error saying the disk is full you won’t be able to save to the harddrive. That’s because modern harddrives are way bigger than photoshop can handle through emulation and the full disk error is the default error message for problems related to hard disk space so the error is erroneous. It’s actually that the harddrive is too big, not full. So the work around is to save to a small drive of less than a terrabyte, or to create a junk file so big it fills that space (a real waste), or… save to a usb drive! Ha! Easy fix. Stupid, but easy fix.

Easy fix for both problems: In theory both of these symptoms are the same problem. The hard drive is just too big for the software to handle. So if you create a partition of say 250 Megs and then set the scratch disk to that and save your files to that you should be okay. Often you have to save to a subfolder within that device however or you’ll still get a “scratch-disk full” error. Ugh.

REAL SOLUTION: All of these solutions will help in case you already have your Linux system setup in a way that is not ideal, but if you simply install your Linux OS on a drive or drive partition that is less than a terabyte you won’t have either one of these problems in the first place and you’re photoshop will work as soon as you install it. You may still have trouble saving to a partition larger than a terabyte, but that’s easily solved by making a small partition or saving to a USB drive. But again often you have to save to a subfolder within that device however or you’ll still get a “scratch-disk full” error. Ugh.

Another problem you may face in photoshop in Ubuntu Linux is that the ALT button is used by the operating system for various things including moving the window by alt+click drag. And so you can’t use the alternate version of each tool in photoshop just by holding down ALT. The easy solution is to first hold down the “super” button which is usually configured to be the “windows” button on most keyboards and then you can hold down the ALT button as usual to access those tool functions. Not a problem, but a little annoying. There are other ways to fix them but they don’t work for everyone and it’s better not to mess with default settings if you can avoid it. Luckily in this case you can.

How to Find all Applications/Programs in Linux: The launcher for Ubuntu (Unity) sucks bad. It’s impossible to find the systematic links to the applications and it is impossible to set the application to launch with super user/admin/administrator privileges, so a lot of the time you don’t even know the name of the program you are trying to launch, where it is, or how to sudo it. Go to terminal and run  dkpg -l to get a list of the programs available (you can use asterisk and partial names if you want to narrow it down). Then launch the program with gksudo (then nameofapplication). If gksudo isn’t installed install it.

A common program would be partitionmanager so… gksudo partitionmanager