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FreeMind on Apple Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Update: FreeMind has been updated to work out of the box on Apple Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

FreeMind is a mind mapping tool to help you structure your ideas. The best part about it is that its both Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and cross platform as it runs on Java.

With a default upgrade to Apple Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and loading FreeMind you are asked to install Rosetta.

Now, I don't want to install Rosetta as I wanted to eliminate all legacy PowerPC code on my machine, and let my machine run as best as it possibly could. Even upgrading to the latest unstable release of FreeMind (v0.9.0 Release Candidate 4 at this time of writing) doesn't help.

Doing a bit of googling, I found a result on how to remedy this issues. Unlucky for me, the site was in Japanese, but thanks to the help of Google, we were able to translate the article.

Explanation

Executing a file inside the FreeMind application on the JavaApplicationStub will show us the problem. Assuming that FreeMind is in the /Application directory, open the Terminal and execute:

file /Applications/FreeMind.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub

Results:

/Applications/FreeMind.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub: Mach-O executable

You'll see that the JavaApplicationStub is a Mach-O executable. FreeMind packaged their application without the x86 executables.

Lucky for us, we can find a substitute on the computer. Execute:

file /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub

Results:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub (for architecture i386):	Mach-O executable i386
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub (for architecture ppc7400):	Mach-O executable ppc

You will notice that it has all the architectures.

Solution

Inside the terminal execute:

cp \
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub \
/Applications/FreeMind.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub

Now open up FreeMind, and enjoy the Mind Mapping. It'll take a while to load, but it works just fine.

Update: FreeMind has been updated to out of the box on Apple Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard