Yes, it is possible! To my own suprise, I was able to install Photoshop CS4 on Ubuntu.
I did it on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 RC. It has known to work on Ubuntu 8.10, but it gave me a segmentation fault, probably because I had been messing around 
. I tested it with the trial version downloaded from adobe.com.
To do so, you need Wine. I will take you through the steps that I’ve taken:
1. If you have used wine before, please start of with a clean .wine folder. Or bottle you Photoshop by doing every action with a specific wineprefix.
2. Install Wine 1.1.16 from here.
3. Download winetricks and install necessary libraries. Also make sure you have a decent driver for your graphics card installed.
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks sh winetricks msxml6 gdiplus gecko vcrun2005 sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
3. If you have a non-english Ubuntu installed please put LANG=C before the following command like this:
LANG=C wine Setup.exe4. Install Wine 1.1.19 from here, to fix the menu bar bug.
5. To fix the text-layer bug, put atmlib.dll in “~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system 32″. You can download it from several places if you search it on google.
6. Run it!
It was tested on an amd64 and i386.
The reason why you have to set the “LANG” variable, is that Photoshop searches for files in “Program files”, if you don’t set it, wine installs it into a local translation of Program files.
Very happy that Wine made such a big progress over the last years. But there are a lot of regressions in the last versions. That is the reason you sometimes have to try other versions of wine for the installer. But 1.1.16 and 1.1.19 are not stable versions, so I forgive them. Last version that was declared stable till today was 1.0.1.
I also got Ableton 7 and MS Office Excel, Word and Powerpoint 2007 working with wine!
Big thanks to Quitte for helping me out.
Thanks for the great post. I’ve just installed Ubuntu 9.04 and this post will be a great help.
Andrew Mason
1 May 09 at 12:00
It’s a pleasure! Could someone confirm this method?
ruben
1 May 09 at 14:13
Installing now….
Will post the results when finished
OS: Ubuntu 9.04
Vahe
2 May 09 at 17:44
Looks like the installation is fine but I can get it to work. It hangs on the splash.
Here’s the console output:
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32e7a4,0×00000000), stub!
fixme:wtsapi:WTSRegisterSessionNotification Stub 0x1003c 0×00000000
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0×00000048 at address 0x39875b8a (thread 0009), starting debugger…
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0×00000048 in 32-bit code (0x39875b8a).
Vahe
2 May 09 at 19:54
Thanks for putting it to the test!
On what does the splash hang? Initializing or loading something? Could you specify?
But I have to say that I’m not an expert at this. What wine version do you have installed? Have you killed all wine processes?
Look for “ps -e | grep wine” and “ps -e | grep exe”. I tried installing and running it again, and again it worked. Note that I did it on a clean wine prefix.
Contact me by using the form and I can take a look if you’d like.
ruben
2 May 09 at 20:07
The installation was done with wine 1.1.16.I run Photoshop with 1.1.19. It just shows the blue spash and doesn’t even load any files. I’ve uploaded the screenshot here: http://www.pc-geek.info/screen.png
Do I have to install IE6?
Also, the photoshop installation was done on a clean wine install.
Vahe
2 May 09 at 21:25
I’m terribly sorry, but I never experienced this bug before. I have been stuck while loading certain modules, but that was caused by previous wine processes running.
I didn’t need to install IE6. It actually sounds a little like a hardware problem… Have you tried rebooting? So it clears out memory.
Contact me by using the form.
ruben
2 May 09 at 21:39
I gave up… I’m running Windows XP on Virtualbox. I believe it’s hardware problem so thanks anyway..
Vahe
3 May 09 at 20:15
No problem. Wine is still experimental, but it’s improving. You can use Photoshop CS2 perfectly with Wine. Never tried CS3.
ruben
3 May 09 at 20:26
cs4 works great in virtual box in xp sp3 performance edition. its awsome installing onone products now…sweet!!!
maxim
9 May 09 at 19:27
Brilliant! Thanks to this I know have the one program I missed the most from windows.
From what I’ve tried out it works perfectly (on amd64), thank you for this how-to
Ben
10 Jun 09 at 15:15
hmm I’ve just noticed that the type tool doesn’t work. When you click on it everything freezes. Any idea what could cause this?
Thanks.
Ben
11 Jun 09 at 11:44
Hey, I followed the steps but step (3) installation failed.
When set-up checking system profile, there was an error mesage “Critical errors were found in the setup. Please see setup log files for details.” from “Wine Internet Explorer”. Btw, using CS4 on 9.04 with 1.1.16 for 8.10. Help greatly appreciated！ ：O
Mixam
11 Jun 09 at 11:54
Hi Ben, thanks for the comments!
There are two possible causes imo:
1. This is normally solved by the fifth step (including the atmlib.dll). Did you do this? Did you change anything in winecfg? Normally you should not have edited the winecfg.
2. Also, make sure you have msttcorefonts installed.
Hope this helps you out.
ruben
11 Jun 09 at 22:09
I’m not sure if I can help you with this. If it is IE-related, then it sounds like the gecko engine didn’t install correctly…
Maybe try to run
winetricks ie6This will (re)install ie6.
Although not really sure about this, without viewing your errors.
If you have time, you should report this bug to wineHQ:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14318
BTW: It’s nice to notice a back-reference from WineHQ to this article
ruben
11 Jun 09 at 22:16
ruben thank you that was the problem! I had mistakenly copied amtlib.dll instead of atmlib.dll
Ben
12 Jun 09 at 11:18
@Ben
Haha, no problem, I’m happy things work for you
ruben
13 Jun 09 at 17:42
Hello, when I put in: “LANG=C wine Setup.exe”, I habe a long list with errors… e.g.
[code]err:shell:SHCoCreateInstance failed (0x800401f0) to create CLSID:{a07034fd-6caa-4954-ac3f-97a27216f98a} (Query file associations) IID:{c46ca590-3c3f-11d2-bee6-0000f805ca57} (unknown)
err:shell:SHCoCreateInstance class not found in registry[/code]
And another Question:
Why know Wine where is the setup.exe? – I learned that I have to write
[code]cd [/code]
Please give me the reason :’(…
I choose Ubuntu now cause I thought that Photoshop works on it…
Yannick (Yvier6 on Twitter)
Yannick
17 Jul 09 at 22:03
thanks a lot.
andcat
7 Oct 09 at 16:11
So guys, does it work?
elect
17 Feb 10 at 17:30
HI RUBEN!
Surfing the web found your tutorial, have the same problem some one else had with the text tool, I place the atmlib.dll in the folder all tutos suggest out there, but the problem persissts.
Don’t remember where was it exactly, but found that in the Libraries tag of Winetricks we had to “manually” add this library, but it doesn’t show in the drop-list… tryed typing it, so as to “force” wine to look for that file, but still the seame problem…
Guess I’ll have to instal some WIN on a virtual machine.
Best whises!
Vandro
5 Mar 11 at 00:35
Works like charm on mint10. instaled ps cs4 and had text problem but lib fix helped
ty for nice tut
OmkaraD
21 Mar 11 at 00:25