How to install Photoshop in Ubuntu and LinuxMint

Photoshop is an important tool to many of us here. There are people who stick with Windows or Mac for gaining a native environment to use this tool on. For Linux users,photoshop there is Gimp, the perfect alternative to Photoshop . However, there are some users that are used for photoshop and they can not switch to Gimp for some reason..

Using wine to install Photoshop used to work fine upto Ubuntu version 10.04, but it now breaks for 10.10 and/or Natty.

This tutorial will show you the shortest way to install PS CS5 on the latest builds of Ubuntu available.

Things you’re going to need:

  • A Computer Running Ubuntu Maverick or Natty

  • A Computer running windows (Or a VM, your choice)

  • A Copy of the Adobe CS5 installer. This is publicly downloadable on the Adobe website (Shareware).

Let’s get started, shall we?

Install Adobe Cs5 on your windows machine first. We need to copy a few registry entries from there for PS to work fine in Ubuntu. After the installation, run regedit and navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Adobe

Right click on the Adobe folder and select “Export”, name this file “PS.reg”.

Switch to your Ubuntu machine now.

Install wine and the Microsoft true-type fonts with the command below.

sudo apt-get install wine ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Then run the following to create your own .wine folder.

winecfg

PS is a native windows app and has a few Windows based dependencies. We need to use winetricks to install this. Execute the following:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks msxml6 gdiplus gecko vcrun2005sp1 vcrun2008 msxml3 atmlib

Now comes the tiresome part. Since we can’t use the installer on Ubuntu, we’ll need to copy the needed files over from Windows to Ubuntu. These are the files you need to copy and where they need to go.

C:Program FilesAdobe	---->	$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe
C:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobe	---->	$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe
C:Documents and Settings$USERApplication DataAdobe	----> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/users/$USER/Applications Data/Adobe
C:windowssystem32odbcint.dll	---->	$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/odbcint.dll

Once that’s done, copy over your “PS.reg” file from your Windows machine to your home directory and execute the command below.

wine regedit adobe.reg

That’ll import the registry entries into the wine registry. We are done.

To test it out, go to go toHome -> .wine -> drive_c -> Program Files -> Adobe ->Adobe Photoshop CS5 with your favorite shell and right click on the ‘Photoshop.exe’ and select “Open with Wine Windows Program Loader”

PS CS5 should now load. You might consider creating a shortcut and placing it on your desktop for easier access.