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Back up the Rosetta 2 installer for offline use #

Prologue

• Rosetta may be removed from M1 Macs in some regions on macOS 11.3

Procedure

1. Download and install Rosetta 2:
   % softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

2. Find path to installer:
   % grep RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg /var/log/install.log

3. Copy installer for safekeeping:
   % cp /path/to/RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg /path/to/backup/dir/

Testing

1. Turn on new M1 Mac mini, keeping it disconnected from Internet

2. Copy Intel-only app to /Applications and attempt to launch:
   

3. Select "Not Now"

4. Run RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg installer:
   

5. Relaunch nvALT - success:
   

More

• RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg is 469,647 bytes with a SHA-256 checksum of 4079935a65385c6da8063e0c35a48419c03618bab8111ee35198c4baa1d7c81b

• Contents of RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg as reported by Suspicious Package:
  

Updates

• Cyrus shared another method for obtaining RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg:

  You can download RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg directly by parsing the .sucatalog from Apple: https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-rosettaupdateauto-1.sucatalog.gz It looks like every macOS build number in the .sucatalog file only appears once, so you can search for your macOS build number in the .sucatalog file and the url for RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg will be a few lines above.

• Archiving all Rosetta 2 installers

/mac | Mar 27, 2021

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