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Creative Suites Macintosh

Eric @ MCACommunity Member

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SOLVED: Blank Installer Alert dialog - CS4 Installer vs Safari 4

Jul 24, 2009 8:12 PM

According to the Adobe KB, the blank installer alert dialog is a result of having Safari 4 installed. (Seriously?!)

They were of the opinion that it meant you didn't meet minimum system requirements, but that's not the only way to get it. You can also get it for something as piddling as have Safari or Firefox running when you launch the Installer. (OMG! He's running a browser! Stop everything!!!1!)

As such, here's a way to locate the actual error message that should be in the Installer window.

The Fix

The fix assumes you have already run the CS4 installer and staring at a blank Installer Alert right now. If you're not, do so first.

Then do the following...

Launch Console, located in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.
Click the Logs button in the upper left of the window.
In the list of logs on the left, navigate to:
```
/Library/Logs/Adobe/Installers
```
Locate the current install. It will end in today's date.log.gz. For example:
```
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium 4.0 07-24-2009.log.gz
```

Click the log and scroll to the very end, where you will see an ERROR, followed by the reason.

For example:

[       0] Fri Jul 24 11:24:37 2009 ERROR
Installation cannot continue until the following applications are closed:
 - Firefox
Please exit these applications and then click Retry to proceed.

Now you can Force Quit the Installer (option-click on the icon in the Dock to see this menu item), rectify the situation, and try, try again...

Hope this helps others.

PS to any Adobe personell who might drop by: You cannot kill the Installer & Updater soon enough. Give us Apple Install packages like Jobs intended!

I just wasted 5 or 6 hours of my company's time and 12gb of your bandwidth installing a bunch of copies of CS3 because of the wretched Installer/Updater. If I'd had Apple Install packages, I could have downloaded it once and fired the updates to all machines and been done in 20 minutes.

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Eric @ MCA,

Community Member

Jul 28, 2009 11:26 AM

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Harbs just pointed me to an excellent blog post that gives me hope there will eventually be light at the end of the Installer tunnel in CS5, btw. Others might take heart from it too. I'm including a quick quote from the start of it to whet your appetite. It definitely deserves wider distribution!

Adobe Updater Approach

Adobe's updater technology through CS4 is known as the Adobe Update Manager (AUM.) AUM has a long history of various problems. Our user community has been vocal about the number and types of problems experienced through AUM. In the next instance of the Creative Suite, we intend to provide a different update experience that should address a number of the most egregious problems discussed thus far. In particular:

Failure of an update to successfully apply to a user's system
Failure to adequately roll back a partial or failed update, thus leaving the user's system in an unusable state
The update process interferes with users trying to get their own work done

When we started out the design for the new Adobe Updater we set a few simple goals:
Make the Adobe Updater install the updates successfully and if the updater fails, ensure whatever was installed as part of updater is rolled back and the machine is back to its orginal state.
Make the Adobe Updater non-intrusive. The Adobe Updater should not interfere with the user's tasks by poping dialogs in middle of your extremely critical workflows. It will not be an in your face application.
Make sure the Adobe Updater when running does not hog your CPU cycles.
Using the Adobe Updater should be a pleasant experience.
Checking for updates is silent and the notification for available updates is clean and unobtrusive.
Provide ways for system administrators to turn-off updates completly. Secondarily, we also want to enable easier management of updates by system administrators.

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logix@ideal,

Aug 11, 2009 9:15 AM

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Even if the system satisfies the minimum system requirements for CS4 still this blank installer alert window opens up and freezes the installation process on Mac 10.4.11 and Safari 4.0 as given in the KB but the problem as illustrated by the earlier gentleman is due to some other program interfering with the installation process like the firefox.
I have tried and tested process which has proved useful in 2 different cases of similar kind is that:

Start the Mac in safe boot.*
Then try installation normally.
It goes on smoothly and completes the installation process.
Now you can boot your system normally and continue using your software.

* To safe boot a Mac keep the shift key pressed after you have pressed the power button.
For details to safe boot a MAC refer to the following link:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455

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Weston Danford,

Oct 18, 2009 5:00 PM

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I have Snow Leopard, Design Premium CS4 Student Edition and this didn't work for me. I have been experiencing the issue where I start up Acrobat Pro 9 but it asks for a serial number which shows invalid when I enter it. All other programs work fine. So, I uninstalled just Acrobat Pro 9 using the uninstaller in the Applications>Acrobat 9 folder. When I start up the setup window from the discs and choose to install only Acrobat 9, the installer hangs at "Preparing to Install", even in Safe Mode. I didn't have Safari open and even checked the console as mentioned above but found no errors.

So do I have to completely uninstall all of CS4 first and then go into safe mode or should this fix work without uninstalling everything? Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.

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Simplicity5,

Oct 19, 2009 5:34 PM

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First of all, I have to say I am a poor college student, and I have been saving up money awhile for CS4. I have finally got about enough, to afford the student addition of the CS4. I can get it at an 80% discount (or about what Adobe should be charging everyone) Regardless, I wanted to at least try everyone out before I decided to make this purchase. I download Dreamweaver and am immediately confronted with this Installer Alert problem. I have yet to see any solution realsed by Abode itself, so I moved on an continued to install Flash, Photoshop, and Fireworks. My Flash and Photoshop work just fine, but my Fireworks has some other problem completely unreleated to anything.

Alright, back on topic here. The weird thing is it seems different people have trouble with different forms of Adobe software. I have heard some people experience this error with Photoshop and some with Flash. Like I said, I have this problem currently with Dreamweaver. I have downloaded it multiple times, attempted to install it in safe mode (no success), and finally I attempted this console troubleshooting method. It insisted that I needed to uninstall Dreamweaver CS4, which doesn't really make since considering I have yet to install it. Abobe please get your stuff together, and address how to fix this problem. As a potential customer I am not impressed with these annoying errors.

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BrianMcNay,

Community Member

May 1, 2010 2:46 PM

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Thank You for the solution!

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