Netbeans fails to start

I upgraded to leopard finally, and NetBeans failed to start. The symptoms were this: I double click the icon in the doc and it jumps up and down a couple of times and then nothing. I had a look in the logs and I found the following “…org.netbeans.ide[14238]) Exited with exit code: 139″ I also noticed it was always preceeded by … ReportCrash[14543] Formulating crash report for process java[14542].

The Java crash report contained the following

Process: java [15805]
Path: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home/bin/java
Identifier: java
Version: ??? (???)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: bash [15667]

Date/Time: 2009-04-12 13:27:07.932 +0100
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.6 (9G66)
Report Version: 6

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: 0×000000000000000d, 0×0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 ??? 0×00000001000111c1 0 + 4295037377
1 ??? 0×000000010001276f 0 + 4295042927
2 ??? 0×0000000100012a1c 0 + 4295043612
3 ??? 0×000000010001104d 0 + 4295037005

Thread 0 crashed with X86 Thread State (64-bit):
rax: 0×0000000000000041 rbx: 0×00007fff5fbfe550 rcx: 0×0000000000000000 rdx: 0×0000000000000014
rdi: 0×0000000100014708 rsi: 0×352e312f736e6f69 rbp: 0×00007fff5fbfe330 rsp: 0×00007fff5fbfe330
r8: 0×0000000092b5a5f2 r9: 0×0000000000000000 r10: 0×0000000000000000 r11: 0×0000000000000000
r12: 0×0000000000000014 r13: 0×0000000100014708 r14: 0×0000000000000015 r15: 0×0000000000000000
rip: 0×00000001000111c1 rfl: 0×0000000000010293 cr2: 0×0000000100014708

Binary Images:
0×7fff5fc00000 – 0×7fff5fc2e643 dyld 97.1 (???) <b40847f1ce1ba2ed13837aeccbf19284> /usr/lib/dyld

After much searching it seems it may be a problem with apples 64bit JVM, it all seems quite complicated and I don’t fully understand it but this thread here seems to say that that is the problem and that there is a strange workaround. To get NetBeans starting again, albeit only from the terminal, I added the following line to by .profile file in my home directory (you need to log out and back in again for it to take effect):

export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME:/no/path

I found I could then open NetBeans from the command line with the following command:

open /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.5.1.app

Not a proper solution but it gets you working again when you have an assignment due, and on that note!

!!UPDATE!!

Had I read more carefully I would have found this link to a better solution. Basically it tells you how to remove the 64bit part of the java excitable so NetBeans can only use the 32bit version. The steps are this:

Open Terminal.app, become root (sudo -s) and run the following commands.
(The ‘#’ is the shell prompt showing that we’re running as root)
# cp -p /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java /tmp/java_original_binary
# lipo /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java -remove x86_64 -output /tmp/java
# cat /tmp/java > /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java

Thanks to Noah Williamson for the tip

*More update*

Apple software update ran this morning and installed a java update. This removed the fix and stopped netbeans opening again. Applying the fix was marginally more tricky this time – the final command failed because of permission issues. The work around I found was to go to /tmp/java and manually allow read and write to everyone and to do the same for /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java . I’m not sure if you need to do the first one but you defiantly need to do the second. When done I set the permissions back to how they were. now I’m able to work again.