Monday, December 24, 2007

Where did Installer go in Leopard?

My Macbook crashed hard for the first time last night, and a few things got bolloxed up. For one, my fonts were and are still knackered - opening the Font Book application shows 0 fonts, even if I tell it to add fonts. Adding fonts it tells me not to add causes it to use more and more memory until the allocator won't give it anymore and it dies (around 1.6 gigs at this stage).

Another problem is that file associations got nuked. Fair enough, I can rebuild those as I run into them... but when I tried to apply a patch to NeoOffice, I'm told:

There is no default application specified to open the document "NeoOffice-blah.pkg".


Well, that's a bit strange, so I google and find that I need to use /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app for these. Great! Or not great, because the file is MISSING. I see similar problems on forums (what would we do without them? well, without the ones with actual answers anyway), and people generally recommend the poor user to reinstall via "Archive and Install" which supposedly keeps your user files/settings.

Before I made such a serious commitment to dig myself deeper in the shite, though, I did another quick google and found that as of OS X version 10.5 "Leopard", the Installer application is now located in /System/Library/CoreServices, along with a horde of other utilities.

So to others encountering this problem, DO NOT REINSTALL before checking there. It's unlikely that the program has let itself out the back door into the night. It's probably right there, hiding under your bed.
Don't be too hasty to reinstall your OS - there's usually a reasonable fix out there... Now if I can only find my font fix...
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4 comments:

  1. Unknown9/4/08 19:40

    Arrrgh! I have the exact same problem, many things going wrong with my leopard install :( I was about to reinstall because of the pkg problem (like having no accessible fonts isn't enough), but you just saved me! Thankyou!

    ...So, did you ever sort out the inaccessible fonts? :P I'm off to trawl your other posts in search of an answer...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oisín9/4/08 22:45

    Yep, the Apple guys' fix is in http://vaguevagaries.blogspot.com/2008/01/dude-wheres-my-fonts.html ... delete com.apple.ATS or whatever it was :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous27/2/09 09:16

    Thanks very much for the article.

    I was trying to re-install a failed OS X update with Installer.app and couldn't work out where it'd gone!!

    Cheers!

    Jon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown27/2/09 09:43

    And finally, I found what the problem was - I needn't have reinstalled, it seems. Leopard (10.5.6 specifically I think) has big problems with non-english character sets being used for the UI. Mine was set to Cymraeg/Welsh; immediatety upon setting this preference, and restarting, everything went crazy. It's beyond just fonts and lack of default apps - most apps crash on boot, though I didn't spot a pattern, if any.

    Can't find an actual solution beyond being forced to use the latin alphabet.

    ReplyDelete

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