Installing Maya 2008 on Mac OS X 10.6 or later

On my first day back and at 9:00 I had to put 20 iMacs on Active Directory and install Maya 2008, all because I had no idea their would be anyone using the computer suite. Active Directory was the easy thing, but I had problems when it came to installing Maya 2008.

I had two mpkg files on the server (taken from the install dvd's) one for Maya 2008 and one for SP1 (which turns out to be the full maya with sp1). Upon trying to install either it would say it was done and prompt for installation of Rosetta (although it turns out this is only if you need to run the serial authorisation program and do vector renders later). I looked in the Application/Autodesk/Maya 2008 folder only to find FCheck and a folder!

I did a few searches on the internet and found this very helpful blog post. It turns out the main Maya install pkg file only installs on 10.4 or 10.5 operating systems and no others! Not sure if this is standard procedure as it does say that it works on 10.4 or later. So just change the InstallationCheck file located in:

/Maya2008SP1.mpkg/Resources/Maya_core2008.pkg/Resources/InstallationCheck

To get there using the finder you need to right click on the pkg file and select "Show Package Contents"

So, basically change the section which says;

10.4|10.5|

and add
|10.6|

For some reason he's also added an * which is probably a 'wildcard' which I don't think is needed, but I haven't tested my hypothesis.

This worked just fine (although not with the original installer without SP1). I sent this to the task server to be installed which worked until the server crashed!