Small Dog is a well-loved institution in Vermont, and we help take care of some other signature Vermont companies. One of my favorites is Ben & Jerry’s, where we help support their graphic design and web design staff. They are a great group of talented designers who are responsible for all the clever ice cream packaging as well as the graphics you see in any Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shop, or on their website.
One of the designers has been having issues running Adobe CS3 updates. Adobe provides an update mechanism to keep all the software up-to-date, and it downloads updates from the Adobe servers and installs them, much like Apple’s software update does. This client kept having update failures for new versions of VersionCue and some Adobe Asset stuff. I tried all sorts of trouble-shooting on the machine, repairing permissions, doing all Apple updates, and then manually downloading the updates and trying to install them. The other Adobe apps would update, but not these few components. They would simply stall and just sit there with half a progress bar until I quit.
After some searching on the internet, I found my answer. Like many products, Adobe installs a folder for itself in the Library/Application Support folder. These folders are normally owned by the system user and the admin group, but this Mac’s Library/Application Support/Adobe folder was owned by the user itself.
Several folders within there are used by the Adobe Update application to do its updates, so with the folder owned by the user, those update apps are run with the user’s authorization, not the system. Furthermore, some of the files those updates need to modify are in those folders. The solution is to change the ownership of that folder to the root user, and then the updates can complete!
To do it, go to and run Terminal (Applications/Utilties/Terminal), and type in the following command:
sudo chown -R root:admin “/Library/Application Support/Adobe”
It will ask for your password and then change the ownership of that folder and all folders inside it. Wait for it to complete, quit Terminal and you’re done! The Adobe updates should now run properly.
Please let us know if our Consulting staff can help solve a problem for you or your business!