10.6: Launch FreeMind without using Rosetta

Oct 05, '09 07:30:06AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

After installing 10.6 and downloading and installing the latest version (8.0) of FreeMind, attempting to run FreeMind would display a dialog requiring that I install Rosetta before I could run the application.

Actually, the part that needs Rosetta is JavaApplicationStub, a small program that allows Java app bundles to be launched just like any other standard Mac OS X app. The problem is that the JavaApplicationStub bundled in FreeMind was a PowerPC executable. I wanted to avoid using Rosetta if easily possible. Looking around, I found some information about JavaApplicationStub.

In Terminal, I navigated into the FreeMind application bundle:

$ cd /Applications/FreeMind.app/Contents/MacOS
Once there, I did the following:
$ mv JavaApplicationStub JavaApplicationStub.old
$ cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub JavaApplicationStub
I made a copy (rather than a symbolic link, as per the blog article above) in consideration of the warning at the bottom of the blog article: Multiple applications linked to the same JavaApplicationStub might not be able to be running at the same time. I haven't tested whether that's still an issue or not, but since the stub is a mere 60KB or so, a copy is no big deal.

Now, launching FreeMind in the usual way (i.e. via the Finder) will use the native JavaApplicationStub rather than the old, bundled PPC stub. I imagine this should work for any Java application using an old version of this stub.

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090915085543375