Wednesday, February 3, 2010

How to run iFreeBudget on a Mac

I do not own a Mac, so I cannot say if this is the best and/or easiest way to do this.
Thanks to user John Jackson for these instructions.  
"It works on Mac OSX Leopard. Apple includes several versions of the VM in their Java releases for OSX 10.5 (Leopard) - 1.5, and 1.6 are still being actively worked on.
You can go here if you don''t have the latest:
http://developer.apple.com/java/
You need to change the JAVA_CMD environmental to use 1.6 instead of 1.5.
First, make sure you have 1.6.
Open a termainal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal).
At the prompt paste the following line and hit file
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java.
If you get the message "(No such file or directory)" then you do NOT have java 1.6, otherwise you''ll get a message telling you what kind of file "java" is
( on my architecture it says "Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64" but yours may be different).
So, we have Java 1.6, but how do we make iFreeBudget use it?
We have to change the "run.sh" script so that it points to the 1.6 VM.
Open "run.sh" with vi, nano, whatever you like.
Skip down to the "export JAVA_CMD" line - near the bottom.
Insert the following line AFTER the "export JAVA_CMD":
export JAVA_CMD=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java
I hope this helps.
I am neither a Mac nor Java expert - just an old unix hacker that knew how to make this one work.