A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I'd do a standard upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I was wary because I have a fairly customized installation of Leopard. I've done a good deal of tweaking in the Terminal to get things set up for the sake of web development. However, having faith, I went ahead and did it any way. I figured that it would go smoothly.
It did not.
Right away when booting in to my account the system would hang. I'd get the spinning beach ball, and the magnifying glass for Spotlight appearing in the top right corner. Nothing else. No dock. No menu bar. Nothing. Frozen. I could safe boot in to the system with my account (holding down shift button when starting) but a standard log in would not work.
At that point, I decided that I'd revert with a complete time machine backup and try again some other day. I shifted my strategy to do a clean install.
A week later, my adventure with a clean install began. Until last night, I was quite pleased with the progress. Happy with the installation and configuration of the system, I started transferring files. Then I started with the fonts. I copied the contents of the ~/Library/Fonts directory from the leopard disk to my clean snow leopard disk. It took a lot longer than it should have. I copied the contents of the ~/Library/FontCollections directory in the same way. I was immediately suspicious. I then un-did those copies. Removed all of the user fonts. Removed the new Font collections. Something just didn't seem right. Curious but content, I moved on.
I then started up an instance of Eclipse. And it crashed. I checked the log, where I saw a NullPointerException which mentioned this:
at org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Device.getFontList(Device.java:369)
Very interesting.
I then rebooted the machine, and found the same problem that I had when I did the normal upgrade. System hang. Frozen. The spinning beach ball of death. Defeated, I went to bed.
Thinking that the problems I had were probably related, I did a search to see if clearing the font caches might work. Honestly, I didn't even know if there was such a thing. Apparently there is, and this is where I found the details about clearing a font cache in Mac OS X.
The good news is that clearing the font cache worked! I've managed to fix the problem and boot in to Snow Leopard without hanging or freezing. This is what I did:
- Consider removing all of your user fonts and font collections -- I don't know if this is necessary.
- Reboot, holding down the SHIFT button as the system starts - this boots into safe mode
- Log in to your account from the log in screen
- Open the Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
- At the command line, use aprutil to clear the font cache type this:
atsutil databases -removeUser
If you want to remove font caches for all users (I did), type this:sudo atsutil databases -remove
Since you're usingsudoto execute this command, you will need an administrator password. - Reboot the machine, and you should be good to go. At least, if you have the same problem I did.
