Serum Installer on Apple Silicon

Started by gabegarza1021

gabegarza1021

I'm trying to install Serum on my MacMini M1, but it says it needs to install Rosetta 2.
I thought Serum is native for Apple Silicon, why does it need Rosetta 2 installed?

steve_xfer

The plugin is native but apparently the installer (which is Apple/macOS software) is not by default. I think I know a way to work around that in the future. You could copy the plugin and Serum Presets folder over manually from another machine, if you don't want to install Rosetta 2.

I'm glad that you asked. I was wondering how to work around this myself couple months back (not regarding only Xfer plugin but with other plugin installers also) and figured out a way. In short, arm64 tag added to Distribution file's hostArchitectures parameter seems to do the trick at the time of writing (it's discussed here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/667672). Distribution file lives right under the .pkg file and can be edited once the .pkg is unpacked.

Unpacking, modification and repacking can be done with help of pkgutil (fyi: commercial tools like BetterZip is also able to view and extract the contents) as follows:
(Using Installer.pkg file as an example)

If pkgutil is not available on your system you might need to install Xcode or at least the Xcode command line tools.

1) Unpack .pkg to a folder to reveal the Distribution file:
pkgutil –expand Installer.pkg Installer.unpkg
NOTE: use double lines in the above command (saying this in case this forum's post engine joins two consecutive lines as one)

2) Modify Distribution file (you can use the default OS X TextEdit tool) by adding ‘arm64’ in ‘hostArchitectures’ parameter just after 'x86_64' separated by comma. Just search where the 'hostArchitectures=' parameter is in the file. Save changes.

3) Pack folder back as .pkg:
pkgutil –flatten Installer.unpkg Installer.pkg
NOTE: use double lines in the above command (saying this in case this forum's post engine joins two consecutive lines as one)

4) Test the .pkg again.

One final note, Apple has not made it easy for developers to ‘reset OS X to factory defaults’ regarding Rosetta so this kind of condition is sometimes hard to test. I was looking how to do this myself because I 'accidentally' installed Rosetta at one point. Luckily a user called BoBKelso had figured this out here (again, last post of the thread): https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/669486

Let me know if you need additional help. I've tried the above method and confirm it works (at least for now) when done properly.

Your mileage may vary, I'm not saying this is a bullet-proof solution for all .pkg installers but I have had very high success rate with this method.

BR,
Ville