After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up.<\/p>\n
That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something like the following:<\/p>\n
\r\nDate\/Time: 2008-04-14 22:06:45.474 +0900\r\nOS Version: 10.4.11 (Build 8S165)\r\nReport Version: 4\r\n\r\nCommand: Safari\r\nPath: \/Applications\/Safari.app\/Contents\/MacOS\/Safari\r\nParent: WindowServer [86]\r\n\r\nVersion: 3.1 (4525.13)\r\n\r\nPID: 20987\r\nThread: Unknown\r\n\r\nLink (dyld) error:\r\n\r\nSymbol not found: _WebDatabaseDirectoryDefaultsKey\r\n Referenced from: \/Applications\/Safari.app\/Contents\/MacOS\/Safari\r\n Expected in: \/System\/Library\/Frameworks\/WebKit.framework\/Versions\/A\/WebKit\r\n<\/pre>\nThose type of messages go on and on in Console.app. My first round of Googling brought me to a Macrumors thread<\/a> that recommended deleting the history.plist and other parts from ~\/Library\/Safari. I tried removing various files from that directory to no effect and finally just removing the directory altogether. Nada.<\/p>\n
Troubleshooting a PC WITHOUT a web browser really sucks. I suggest everyone try it once in awhile to see just how much the nature of debugging IT problems has changed when you are deprived of a very powerful tool. Luckily, this Mac had a very crufty version of IE lurking so the first thing I tried was a download of Firefox. However, the disk image refused to be mounted! Seems this is also tied in with the security update<\/a>. So basically, I’m left with using IE as my main tool for debugging on this Mac.<\/p>\n
After a bit of googling, it seems that the fix is tied requiring the latest OS X security update (Available at the Support Download<\/a> page). For OS X 10.4.x users you can find a link to the latest Universal here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
However, there is a catch. The security update is only available from that page as a Disk Image. Guess what you can’t open it up under the affected Mac. At this point you’re left with 2 options:<\/p>\n
\n
- Burn the Disk Image to a CD-R\/DVD-R and use it that way<\/li>\n
- Transfer the disk image to another Mac and unarchive it then push it back<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
I decided on the latter option since I hate wasting a CD-R if I don’t have to. After applying the Security Update and rebooting, Safari boots up and things seem chipper again but that was a serious side trip on something I’ve rarely seen Apple ever mess up. Anti-kudos to Apple for making this update on your ‘legacy’ OS really sucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up. That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1216,1215,1214,1217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fixes","category-gripe","category-osx","category-stupid"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}