I was having a whole series of odd behaviors on my Macbook Pro yesterday. These included:
- PKG and MPKG files running through installation and then failing at the "Complete/Finish" Screen
- Eclipse Ganymede and Galileo both having problems rendering WSDL files under JVM 6 (32 or 64bit) but working fine with JVM 5
- Installer intermittently becoming unresponsive before installation launch
This was causing quite a few headaches. At Andrew's suggestion, I ran Disk Utility and checked permissions and the Volume. No real problems of consequence were found in either scan.
Next Andrew suggested that I look at the Logs. First I went into the Console utility, normally this would be populated automatically with a large number of log entries. My Console just continually "searched" the System.log file. After trying to see if there was some other problem I could find without access to the logs, I decided to see if I could fix the log problem, which would then (hopefully) help me identify the problem with the PKG/MPKG files.
After much Googling, I came across a mention of a utility called "newsyslog" . After looking at the man page and experimenting I found that newsyslog has a newsyslog.conf file that associates which log files it should check for and if they exist, it can be configured to automatically roll the log files off (to keep sizes down). What interested me more, was the ability to have newsyslog CREATE log files if it is unable to find them. To gain visibility into what it could and could not find, I simply set it into verbose mode (the -v option) and combined this with the create option (the -CC option). Watching the output, it created a series of logfiles including the System.log file (which was apparently missing).
Once the System.log file was created, I launched the Console utility again and BINGO! Log Messages!
Now for the fun part, I decided to run the VMware Fusion Installer (a MPKG file). Normally I would get all the way through the serial number entry, after populating and clicking continue it would fail. This time I wanted it to fail, because I could finally capture the failure point in the System.log file. Just like when you take your car to the mechanic and hope that it makes that clunking sound (which it does all the time), it remains running silently. In my case, I ran the installation and it completed! I then checked a few other applications that were failing when they would launch the Installer application (they worked fine too). Finally I later launched Eclipse and lo-and-behold, it was able to render WSDL files regardless of the JVM being used!
In a follow-on post next week, I will post directions on how to make Snow Leopard run both JVM 5 and JVM 6 (default after an upgrade is JVM 6 32/64bit is all that exists)