How To: Run Lego Education’s WeDo software on OS X 10.4.11

legologoI realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.

Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6).  Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo.  The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.

To get around this, I did the following:

  1. Install WeDo on a machine running OS X 10.5
  2. Copy the ‘WeDo Software’ folder out of the applications folder, to a flash drive or network location, to later install on your 10.4 machine
  3. Copy the ‘WeDoi386English.pkg’ package from /Library/Receipts/ to your flash drive

Copy these items from your flash drive to the same locations on your 10.4 machine and that will get the software running on your Tiger machine.  To get around the annoying Flash security warning, we need to tell Adobe Flash Player to trust this application by doing the following:

  1. On your 10.4 machine, access the Flash Player Global Security Settings by visiting the settings manager here
  2. Add WeDo to your list of trusted locations by Edit Locations>Add Location>Browse for Folder> and browse to /Applications/WeDo Software/
  3. Click Always Allow

There is a second disc of optional activity templates that came with the software.  To get that content running, do the following:

  1. Install the Activities software on a machine running 10.5
  2. Copy the the /Library/Application Support/WeDo/ folder to your flash drive
  3. Copy it back in the same location to your 10.4 machine
  4. Install Pacifist from Charlessoft
  5. On the Activities installer disc, right click on the ‘WeDo Activity Pack 1.0.pkg’ and select Open With>Pacifist
  6. Click the ‘Resources’ tab, and click the disclosure triangle next to ‘activities.pkg’ to expand its contents
  7. Do the same for the ‘Scripts’ folder
  8. Click the ‘postinstall’ script and click ‘Extract To…’ from the menu bar, to extract it to your flash drive
  9. Copy the script to your 10.4 machine and run it in Terminal

If you launch the WeDo software, the activities will now be enabled (the Lego man’s head will now be yellow and clickable instead of grayed out and non-clickable).  If you need to do this on a larger scale, I used Apple Remote Desktop to copy the necessary files and run the python post install script.  One note on the Flash global settings:  you must copy ‘~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol’ to all of your user accounts on the Tiger machines you’d like to run WeDo.  Instructions for doing that are outside of the scope of this how to.

As always, your results may vary but this has worked flawlessly for us so far.

About the Author: acletras

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3 Comments

    • Reply acletras

      You’re welcome! I hope it still works. It’s been a while since I revisited this, or even had to worry about it at all since I’ve upgraded all of my Macs campus-wide to either 10.5 or 10.6.

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