Upgrading to Java SE 6
I’ve been looking forward to trying out the new Wonderland, Version 0.5 Developer Release 3, and I finally got to it yesterday. I used netbeans to check it out, and that worked first try. Building, however, failed. The complaints looked pretty basic, so I checked the system requirements and sure enough, I needed to upgrade to Java SE 6. I did the download and install from Apple’s site, no problem, except it says:
... adds Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_05 to your Mac. This update does not replace the existing installation of J2SE 5.0 or change the default version of Java.
Well, shoot, I need to change the default. I tried setting JAVA_HOME, but that had no effect. java -version persisted in reporting version 1.5.whatever, as did Netbeans. I googled around and found references to the symlinks in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions, one of which is called “Current” and was pointing to A which pointed to 1.5 which pointed to 1.5.0.
Now, what I should have done at this point is execute Applications -> Utilities -> Java -> Java Preferences, but unfortunately I just did sudo rm and sudo ln and manually moved the Current and CurrentJDK symlinks.
Sometime after doing that, I noticed that Netbeans was no longer working. I set that aside for later, too eager to try the build from the command line. Sure enough, it worked! Took a while, but it built, now that I had the right version of Java.
Next step, I ran the server:
% ant run-server
And that worked, too! Now if only the client would run, I’d be on my way… But no such luck.
% cd core
% ant run
-- snipped out lots of output, well not that much, a page or two --
[java] 2009-03-25 14:05:53.515 java[42245:10b] Apple AWT Startup Exception : *** -[NSCFArray insertObject:atIndex:]: attempt to insert nil
[java] 2009-03-25 14:05:53.560 java[42245:10b] Apple AWT Restarting Native Event Thread
I searched the Wonderland forum, which had never failed me yet. But no clue. What I should have done at this point (duh!) is turn to google. But alas, I am embarrassed to admit, I contacted a busy Wonderland developer, Jordan Slott, who happened to be online. He had never seen this error before, checked a few things, then he googled and found this wonderful post, correctly identified in the comments as a lifesaver.
Just like the blogger, I had set Current to the actual release I wanted to use instead of setting it to A which then points to the release I wanted. Turns out, that breaks AWT. I fixed the links, restarted the server, and then running the client worked. Some of the symlinks in Versions now are:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Nov 12 14:40 1.5@ -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 Mar 24 10:53 1.5.0/
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Nov 12 14:40 1.6@ -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 May 9 2008 1.6.0/
drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 Mar 24 16:10 A/
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 Mar 25 14:33 Current@ -> A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Mar 25 14:34 CurrentJDK@ -> 1.6
Oh and guess what? Netbeans magically runs again now, too. What a surprise.
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