Luke Sheldrick's Blog

Yesterday, my flatmate looked like he was going to pull all of his hair out. He was on the phone to Apple, who kept fobbing him off. So I thought I’d be nice and help out.

Problem

He had bought Aperture 3 from the Mac AppStore, and was working fine. The 10.6.7 update came out, and he’d updated to that too. Still all fine. He’d then bought and installed Final Cut Express 3. After this Aperture panic’s when it opens with something like

Library not loaded: /Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/PluginManager
Referenced from: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/PluginManager: no matching architecture in universal wrapper


Attempted fixes

He’d tried un-installing and re-installing both Final Cut Express, and Aperture in all sorts of combinations. Nothing was working. He then called Apple who pointed him towards this article. However that was for 10.6.6, and he was now on 10.6.7, so couldn’t apply that update.

I took a look, and indeed with any combinations of re-installing, and even re-applying the 10.6.7 update didn’t fix the issue.

Looking at various forums, such as the Apple discussion forums, there were plenty of people having the issue. Reading those, and various blog entries, there were a number of suggestions, from applying the 10.6.6 update, to re-installing OSX (yeah, sure that would probably fix it, but not the best approach), there was even a suggestion to run Aperture in 32bit mode. Nothing worked.

My Fix

So I decided to give up on the forums and t’internets, and try my own method of tracking down the issue. I got my MacBookAir, and took a manual backup with TimeMachine (which backs up to my Solaris SAN). This meant I had a clean backup, if anything went wrong. I am also at patch level 10.6.7. I had a look in /Library/Frameworks and I had the folder PluginManager.framework.

I installed Aperture 3, and all worked. Folder was still there. I then proceeded to install Final Cut Express, and when the installer had finished the folder had been deleted. Wasn’t in the trash or anything. Interesting.

This naturally broke Aperture, as it did on my flatmate’s MBP. Just to see if I could resolve this, in a more methodical fashion, I un-installed Aperture and Final Cut, and then re-applied the 10.6.7 update. Still PluginManager.framework was missing.

I had a good copy of PluginManager.framework so decided to install Aperture and Final Cut, then copy PluginManager.framework back to /Library/Frameworks. After this everything worked as expected.

My flatemate doesn’t have any backups, so I scp’ed my PluginManager.framework folder to his MBP, and indeed, all worked.

Solution

So ignore the forums, they’re just going to have you running around in circles.

Restore PluginManager.framework from your backups, after installing Aperture and Final Cut Express.

If you’ve not installed Final Cut Express yet, make sure you take a copy of PluginManager.framework.

If you’ve already installed, and don’t take backups. Then well, that’s just silly. If you want a copy of my PluginManager.framework folder, leave a comment, and I’ll get a copy over to you. In my tests, going from a MBA, to a MBP, it all worked fine. Not 100% sure if it will work on say a MacPro or iMac, but I would have thought it would, OSX isn’t _that_ much different between machines, except for drivers.

Hope this helps someone else out there.

Last week when I was at a festival, my macbook unfortunately ran totally out of space, and there wasn’t much I could delete. With almost 20 gigs of SD cards, the only thing that could really take the chop was my XP boot camp partition.

Cut a long story short, I’ve now got a much bigger drive (500 GB) for my macbook. Along with the release of Windows 7 RC1 being released I thought I’d give it a try with boot camp.

Installing is pretty easy, burn the Microsoft ISO to a DVD, and follow the normal guide. I detest the fact that I need to burn another CD, or use my OS X Install DVD (which I can never find) to get the boot camp drivers. If like me you’d like to download them, I’ve given a link below to where you may find them. I just put them on a usb stick.

Once installed, pretty much everything works under boot camp, the only thing I found that didn’t play was the ‘Reboot into OS X’ I get an error. This isn’t a huge problem, as you can just hold the alt key on boot up to select OS X or Windows.

Once I got all that working, I then wanted to get the same build / partition under VMware fusion. Reading a few guides, the best way is to follow the normal guide for XP, but change it so the guest is set to Windows 2008 Server. Again, all working pretty well once you install VMware Tools.

The only problem that I did have, is there was no networking for the guest. The NIC just showed as Ethernet Controller. Nothing seemed to get this NIC working, tried manually installing the drivers from the VMWare tools cd, copying from another Windows 7 guest.

The only thing that seemed to fix it, was to shutdown the guest, and add a second NIC, and boot back up. Windows 7 RC1, installs this NIC with no problems at all, and all is working. Intererstingly, it still wont play with the original one. None the less, it’s all working through it’s second, new NIC, so I am happy with that.

Useful links

• Windows 7 RC1
• Guide to installing in boot camp
• Guide to installing in VMWare Fusion
• Downloadable boot camp drivers

A friend told me of a magical cross platform application, which I’ve been using for a while, thought I’d share. Synergy;

“Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). ”

The picture above shows my very small desk, sporting 2x 22 Samsungs, and my Dell D420. Under the desk is an old HP desktop powering the two monitors (and soon to be 9′ touch screen above them, when I get the drivers setup). I rarely use the D420 these days, as I use my MacBook or Advent 4213 notebook when out and about, so didn’t mind giving it up to the desk.

I can use the keyboard and mouse on the laptop, to control both it, and the bigger screens. The neat thing is, with the config setup correctly, I can just move the mouse upwards and the pointer magically moves to the other screen, and the keyboard then controls that computer too. A few other neat options are to have a shared clipboard, and to activate the screensaver/lock screen across all computers with each other.

So on my tiny desk, I can fit in quite a lot of screen real estate. As for using the laptop as a primary keyboard, I started to do this at work when the hotdesk keyboards started to freak me out, and using the laptop keyboard is actually quite nice to use.

Have tested Synergy with os x, and all worked pretty flawlessly there too. Not had a chance to test under windows just yet, as rarely use it these days, but from what I’ve read it all works fine.

I must say I am a bit of a technology fan boy, and loooooove most things electrical, especially if they come under the gadget category.

However I am constantly in two minds when it comes to the argument over apple, I have an iPhone, and a Macbook, which when I sit down and use think they’re brillient, and how could I dream of using anything else..

Until I go back to a non apple product, say my HTC TyTN. I was rummanging through my bag a minute ago and remembered I had it in there, and GPRS was driving me nuts on my iPhone, EDGE hardly ever seems to work. As I am using it however I remembered how nice it is to have full keyboard, and push mail…etc

Then I have my Dell D420, running the new FC9, which I’ve luckily got the inbuilt 3G modem working now. Another thing I love, I can be anywherèopen my tiny laptop, and have the net, no messing with dongles, bluetooth or anything like that…

But then I’ll go back to my mac and blissully forget all that.

Never seems to happen with Windows these days though, to think I used to detest *nix.

My question is, will I ever be satisified? And also where is the bacon roll shop?

_________________
Luke Sheldrick
e: luke@sheldrick.co.uk

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