Use PPC VPN & PPC Flip4Mac on your Intel MacBook Pro or iMac

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Sam Pullara
One of the things missing from the MacBook Pro was the ability to play WMV3 files in Safari and connect to my companies VPN through their browser plugin.

Today I was trying to login to the corporate VPN with my MacBook but couldn’t because although it would install the needed plugin (from F5) it wouldn’t work because the plugin was PPC. When running a Universal application as Intel you can’t load dynamic libraries that are PPC and vice versa. I was able to get the VPN client working by doing this:

1. Use the Finder to go to /Applications
2. Click on Safari and Duplicate it (Apple-D)
3. Rename the copy to SafariPPC
4. Get Info for SafariPPC and choose Open using Rosetta

Now whenever you want to use PPC plugins just launch the SafariPPC application instead of the normal Safari application. So you would think now all you have to do is install flip4mac and you are done.. except that Flip4Mac won’t install using the regular way on an Intel machine because it checks to see what kind of architecture you are running on and refuses. But, you can still install the components you need:

1. Use the Finder to select the Flip4Mac WMV.mpkg installer.
2. Right-click (control-click) and choose “Show package contents”
3. Navigate into Contents/Resources
4. Execute Flip4Mac Web Plugins.pkg to install the components
5. Start (or restart) SafariPPC

Now you can watch WMV movies directly in your browser on your MacBook Pro or Intel iMac!

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