Two Slashes

If you’re deaf or just don’t listen carefully to what people say about Apple’s products, you probably didn’t hear that they released iWork ’08 earlier this week. That’s good and all, but one of the requirements of getting the trial version (or the full version, for that matter) to install was to be running the latest version of OS X, 10.4.10. Well, that’s grand and all, but some of us don’t see such a minor upgrade as a reason to lock users out of what some people (not me, I’ll take OpenOffice) call a great thing. Especially when the “great thing” now comes with an Excel clone to compliment Pages and Keynote.

So, I did some exploring and came up with a way to get iWork running on an older version of OS X. It’s complicated, but if you pay attention it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

To get away with this, you’ll need:

• iWork ’08 (Trial – I assume this works with the Full/Retail edition too)
• A relatively recent version of OS X (I did this on 10.4.8, so 10.4.9 should work, but I don’t know about anything even a little older.)
• Administrative privileges to install software on said copy of OS X and modify system folders

Now…here’s the meat:

1. Find the Packages folder on the root of the CD or disk image. (It may be hidden. If so, you might need to have some fun in Terminal, or show the folder by showing the original of the Install icon. You did notice it was an alias, right?)
2. Show the contents of iWork08Trial.mpkg. (This might be named differently on a retail CD, I don’t know.)
3. Inside Contents/Packages, install all packages except iWork08Trial.mpkg. (Again, use your best judgement in determining which one it is; when I tried to run it directly it complained about an invalid OS.)
4. After the other items (3) have been installed, show the contents of this second iWork package.
5. Inside Contents/ of this second iWork package, there should be a large file named Archive.pax.gz. Copy this to the Desktop and extract it. The OS should extract everything inside the extracted .pax as well, leaving you with an Archive folder.
6. Inside the new Archive folder on your Desktop, you will find an Applications folder and a Library folder. The contents of the Applications folder must be copied to /Applications on your Mac. Likewise with Library to /Library. Be careful and don’t overwrite anything; it would be best for you to do this gently by browsing through the folders and copying things manually.
7. If you want to give your computer a refresher at this point, go ahead and reboot it. It’s not required, but if you’re accustomed to doing it, have at it. Logging out and back in probably works too; I’m only mentioning this because you just added/replaced some system files for components like Spotlight.
8. Run an iWork application. (I chose Pages.) If all is well, it shouldn’t complain that there are components missing. If it does, just hit Run Anyway and it should start up just fine.

Disclaimer: I’m just the bearer of my own explorations and trickery; I’m not responsible should you try and pirate the software (bad) or do something else that isn’t exactly legitimate. This is gray in and of itself because it’s skirting requirements, but I see this as a lesser evil.

I’m also not a fan of developers who say the system requirements of their packages are far higher than they actually should be, such as in this case. If I can run iWork successfully on 10.4.8…why shouldn’t the requirement be somewhere lower and closer to 10.4.8?

Explanation: Undoubtedly, someone’s going to ask how and why this crazy, convoluted method works. It’s simple, really. You see, when Apple set up the installers for the software, they coded a version check into the big one (the first package you show the contents of back in Step 2) and the iWork package (Steps 3-4), but neglected to carry this check into all of the subpackages they install, or the software itself. In this way, it makes it easy to copy them without tripping alarms or crazy error messages complaining that the OS is invalid.