Mac OS X forum: Rosetta and Lion

I think it's still a little unclear about Rosetta and also Java for people upgrading, but your best bet would be to find someone running one of the developer preview releases.

There's basically two ways it could go.

1: Both Rosetta and Java are grandfathered in, meaning that the installer doesn't remove them, but they're no longer maintained and could potentially stop working with any subsequent update due to changes made.

2: The installer removes both of them and there's no option to reinstall

As for whether or not Pages or Word or even LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer will open these old files probably depends on just how old they are. AppleWorks went away a LONG time ago. iWorks came out around 2004-2005 if memory serves, and I believe AppleWorks had been abandoned long before that. If I'm thinking of the right program, it was an old OS Classic program, that Apple did a minimal port of for OS X, and stopped including with new systems about the time they stopped installing OS 9 in a dual boot config. You'll have to check which file types Pages, Word and Writer will open, and probably want to make sure you have all three on your system to figure out which one works best. You may also want to check to see if AppleWorks offers any other format options for saving. If you can get it into a reasonably modern format, such as Office 97-2003, then you shouldn't have much difficulty opening it in any of those three programs.

Just as a general rule though, you need to stop clinging to old software for so long. At some point the pragmatism of ensuring that you can continue to use these files indefinitely needs to outweigh the stubborn and/or cheap part of you that says what you have is working fine. Some degree of that is admirable, but you have to balance it with the fact that the rest of the world is moving on, and your computer won't last forever. Even solid state components eventually fail. Skipping one, maybe two versions isn't a huge deal, but once you go beyond that you're asking for trouble.

Or, it's a bit on the overkill side, but you could just run a copy of 10.6 in a VM. Hate to even suggest it since it's such complete overkill for only one or two apps, but it is a possibility. Since Apple doesn't have a separate upgrade package, every copy of OS X comes with a license, unlike Windows, so there shouldn't even be any legal issues.

And Rosetta was/is not made by Apple, so it's possible the company that
made it will come out with a Lion version at some point. It would just
be a third party download as opposed to being bundled with the OS.

But it has been what, like 5-6 years since Apple transitioned from PPC? This time people were given a graceful transition period, unlike the m68K to PPC transition where it was just a swift kick to the teeth. It really is time to let go of the PPC apps.

I have been using Mac since OS 6 when AppleWorks was ClarisWorks. I can open those documents now with Pages, Microsoft Office and save them in either format for the most part (some that combine word processing and drawings or schematics are a minor problem), and I have all the latest iterations of Pages and Office. But what I miss in those programs is the clean, neat interface that AppleWorks has.

It is at once a simple word processor (no. I don't need to automatically count words in a letter to a nephew), a spreadsheet program, a data base program, a drawing program (do you know how many times I've drawn a valve diagram for someone or an electrical circuit), a painting program. And my wife can use it - or at least some of it - which is not bad for a PhD in English.<div>
What I don't know is how much space Rosetta takes up on this new iMac that I just got or how to remove it if Lion does not during its install.

And I don't know if I need to convert all my documents now (which I can do) or if I will still be able to do it once Lion is active.
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Nice writing there... What was it again you do with your computer? Use it as a typewriter?

For the rest of us were not interested in having to buy software that that already works fine.

You've had what, 5-6 years to transition away from this software and didn't do so? I do believe Apple has said right from the beginning that Rosetta would be a temporary thing, and even if they didn't, it shouldn't have taken much to see that sooner or later it would make sense to get rid of it.

This is hardly like back in the day Apple switched from m68K to PPC and there was no migration path, it was just a swift kick to the teeth. If you bought a shiny new PPC system all your old m68K apps wouldn't run, and developers would have to, at the very least, recompile their apps for the new PPC architecture. It's even been quite a bit better than the change from OS 9 to OS X, where Apple made a clean break with a completely new OS. No source or binary compatibility of any kind, and the only backwards compatibility offered was to dual boot with OS 9.

Since clearly you're far too busy feeling sorry for yourself to try to understand the reasoning behind such a decision, let's make this very simple and blunt: Times change. You don't have to like the changes, but you do have to accept them. Your opinion is not the only one that matters. So like it, don't like it, none of us really cares. Just suck it up and stop with the whole self-important woe-is-me routine. We should have all outgrown this sort of behavior decades ago.

One app that requires Rosetta is Quicken 2007. There aren't any real alternatives at present. iBank is OK but lacks some functionality that Quicken has. The new version of Quicken (Essentials) is so stripped down that even Intuit recommends sticking with the 2007 version if you like its features.

Since I'm a Quicken user, I'll be sticking with Snow Leopard until either the Rosetta problem is resolved or a real alternative to Quicken 2007 comes along.

Actually, there was an migration path from m68K to PPC for Macs; it was called the Mac 68K emulator and it shipped with all PowerPC versions of the Classed Mac OS and was even part of the Classic Environment for MacOS X. This emulator was so good that it was able to run a 1986 program called World Builder (written by Bill Appleton of SuperCard fame) which had been written in 68K assembly!

Furthermore unlike the PowerPC to Intel migration there was a huge hardware overlap. The first PowerPC Mac came out
March, 1994 but Apple continued to make new 68K macs in the LC, Performa and Quadra lines clear into late 1995 with the LC 580 being the last 68K Mac to be discontinued (April, 1996)

I faced a similar problem and got around it by exporting my Appleworks data to a file and importing it into numbers.

Not quite the same but unfortunately there is not a decent, easy to use, database for Mac OS X Lion (don't say Bento)


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but your mileage may vary


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