The Simplest Answer to the Lion vs Rosetta conundrum

I have read through the forums on Macintouch.com and elsewhere till my eyes burn. A lot of people feel upset that Apple did not retain Rosetta in Lion. They’ve grown used to Quicken 2004-2007 and don’t want to change. They’ve grown used to Word/Office 2004 and don’t want to give it up. The same with the Adobe products that cost a bundle to upgrade. They want the goodies that Lion promises, but they want to run their old applications designed for the PowerPC CPU chip. Why can’t they have both?

I feel like the healthcare practitioners who have to keep telling their patients, “No, you have to exercise more and eat less. That magic fruit you see on the Web that’s supposed to help you lose weight without sacrifice? It’s total nonsense. I’ll see you in a month with your new jogging shoes, OK?” You have to make choices in this life. This is a relatively minor one.

Dual-booting between Snow Leopard with Rosetta and Lion with the new features is the best solution I can think of, given the constraints of time, money, technical knowledge and patience. Running Snow Leopard Server through Parallels in Lion would solve the problem; but you’d better hurry up to order Snow Leopard Server at $499 a license before Apple pulls it from the market. You’ll also need more memory to run two operating systems simultaneously. And how much hard drive space do you have left? Um-hmm. Looks like you’d need an external drive to accommodate Parallels’ requirements.

So we’re back to dual-booting. It’s not as groovy as virtualization, but it does the job.

I have another idea, which would allow you to run multiple operating systems at once on a single computer. It involves the use of VNC, adequate ventilation for multiple computers, and some knowledge of networking. If you live in a cramped situation where one computer takes up too much room as is; well, go back to the previous paragraph. If you’re adventurous, wait until next month.

As for going on to other options, such as MoneyDance or iBank in place of Quicken, or Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 in place of Word 2004; I’d say,

Set up a test partition on an external drive

Clone your current setup onto this partition or do a fresh installation of OS X onto it.

Download the free trial of the program you want to try out onto the test partition and install it.

Tell us what happened.

You’re a Mac person. You can move away from the hegemony of Microsoft and Intuit. Try it and see.

I’ll give you a tip if you start setting up several of these test partitions and want to tell them apart. Use the free Onyx program to set up a custom boot screen for each one. It’s just a PNG file. Just set up a blank document in TextEdit. Type, oh, “This is my MoneyDance partition”, then press Cmd+Shift+4 to take a screenshot of just that document. Use Onyx to have it serve as the boot screen for the MoneyDance partition.