Andrea Olivato’s Blog

Gimp rocks. I find it very intuitive, simple to use and easy to learn. It has lots of features and is very expandible via scripts and brushes. Unfortunately I can’t see many designer using it out there. I bet customers usually wants a .psd, not a .xcf dammit.

Anyway that introduction was just to make me feeling a little bit less guilty about the Photoshop installation I realized some days ago, spending no more then 5 minutes configuring and then leaving  the wonderful wine-doors tool doing all the job for me.

The following article is a 3 step and nearly no interaction tutorial to install Photoshop CS2 on (quite) any Linux Environment, owning just a valid Serial Number and an Internet connection.

Below, before the article, you can have a quick graphical preview of the whole process, obtained with some screenshots

1. Install Wine-Doors

Wine doors installation depends on which distro you’re using but the package is usually shipped in official repositories. If not take a look at their downloads page which should help you. On my Gentoo box it was a matter of

autounmask app-emulation/wine-doors-0.1.3
emerge app-emulation/wine-doors

I read quickly Ubuntu/Debian instructions and it seems like you might choose to install the single .deb or add a custom repo to your apt configuration. Should be easy anyway…

2. Setting up Wine Doors

Wine Doors is terribly easy to use and intuitive. On my Gnome desktop it was put on Applications -> System Tools -> Wine Doors. If you can’t find it on your DE menu, just run wine-doors from any terminal.

To install needed core components remember to check the ‘I have a valid Windows(tm) Licence’ box.

Gentoo shipped version got a problem with programs repositories and looking for it on the internet it seems like Arch and Slackware got same problem too. Problems refers to the impossibility to find an xml file containing list of available packages. To solve it you need to open wine-doors preferences via its Edit->Preferences menu, navigate to the Package Repositories tab and add the following ones

Name: Applications
Url: http://www.wine-doors.org/repositories/applications.repo/

Name: System Base
Url: http://www.wine-doors.org/repositories/base.repo/

Name: Games
Url: http://www.wine-doors.org/repositories/games.repo/

Name: Libraries and Fonts
Url: http://www.wine-doors.org/repositories/libraries.repo/

Done this, just refresh your package list from File->Update Package List. This will take a while depending on your connection

3. Download & Install Photoshop

Here’s the funny and incredible part. On the top-right part of your wine doors window, you can search for packages to install. Write photo on it and photoshop will appear alone on your list. Just click install near its name and wine doors will start the download.

If this is the first package you install with wine-doors it will probably need to download some dependancies like fonts or core system files. Allow some time to download and install everything, then it will start downloading photoshop files. Yes, you don’t need cd, dvd or to download anything manual. Wine doors will download the cabs and install them automatically!

As soon as it finishes the photoshop download you can just follow common adobe installation wizard, writing your Serial Number,  choosing an installation location and proceeding with filescopy.  The installer will proceed like it does on any window system and alert you when it finishes.

When you got installation confirmation close the photoshop installer and wine doors. On Gnome environment wine doors is able to install menu entries of Windows programs inside your gnome menu. For example it put photoshop inside my Applications->Graphics menu.

You now just need to start it and after a few secs you will be able to use PS CS2 in your linux desktop without using fully emulated windows systems.