Next, the installer asks where to install Creative Suite 2.
Enter your name, (optionally) company, and the serial number 1130-0412-8377-1896-9751-5759 (you can paste this from the clipboard). The "Personalization" screen then asks for your registration details. Click Next and accept the licence agreement.
(The aim of all this being that all the CS2 content should end up in the same folder.)
The extraction folder should be the same as it was for the Disc3 file, but change it if not, and click Next. Run CreativeSuiteCS2Disc2.exe, change the default extraction folder name to whatever it was for the previous file, and click Next > Finish. Run CreativeSuiteCS2Disc3.exe, make a note of the default extraction folder (it was C:\Creative Suite CS2 for us), and click Next > Finish. Follow the download link to open a page at the Adobe site, and at a minimum download CreativeSuiteCS2Disc1.exe, CreativeSuiteCS2Disc2.exe and CreativeSuiteCS2Disc3.exe from the links at the top of the page (that's a bulky 1.07GB in total, so choose a system with a fast internet connection). If you'd like just to try, though, here's what to do. We've managed to install CS2 on a 64-bit Windows 7 system, but this is unsupported and there's no telling what issues might crop up.
These are old programs, intended for use on Windows 2000/ XP and Mac OS X v.10.2.8–v.10.3.8 (PowerPC® G4 or G5 processor). And, as Adobe has now made them available for free, you can now try out these old industry standards for yourself.īe aware, this won't be for everyone.
Unsurprisingly, the suite isn't as leading edge as it was at release, but the programs do still have their uses. The main components included Adobe Photoshop (photo editing), Adobe Illustrator (vector graphics editing), Adobe InDesign (desktop publishing) and Adobe Version Cue (version control), while Adobe Bridge helped to link everything together. Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below orīe sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.Adobe Creative Suite 2 was a capable collection of powerful design tools, released in 2005. Since this release, the Adobe Web site has been flooded with activity, so you may have to either wait for it to come back online, or access the download links directly through the SlickDeals Web site (the previous link on this page direct-links to Adobe's servers). The CS2 download requires you to first get an Adobe account and a CS2 license, then download the installer from the CS2 downloads page. Therefore, while you can either virtualize the Server versions of OS X 10.6 (which is rather expensive and no longer available) or earlier, or hack virtualization software to allow installation of the OS X 10.6 client, the best option for current Mac users is to perhaps configure a Windows XP virtual machine and install the Windows version of CS2. The only versions of the OS X client that Apple supports in virtualization are those that do not include the Rosetta translator (OS X 10.7 and higher) which is required for running older PowerPC code on an Intel-based Mac.
Unfortunately for Mac users, CS2 is a PowerPC application, so it will require the use of either an Intel Mac running OS X 10.4 through 10.6 with the Rosetta translator installed, or the use of an older PowerPC Mac. Nevertheless, if you have an older computer or have virtual-machine software configured with an older operating system compatible with CS2, then you should be able to get CS2 running.