MacOS X "Tiger" Upgrade Problems

I upgraded my laptop and work desktop computers to MacOS X 10.4 from 10.3 which had served me well. It went mostly ok except for a couple of hitches, which were tough to track down, but in the end, I won…

First, on my laptop, it would absolutely refuse to run the system update utility. Running the application would result in the dialog box just getting stuck and not showing any progress. Running the command line software update utility would result in an “out of bounds” exception. After doing three full re-installs of Tiger, I decided that it must be one of the various setting files causing an error. Using the ktrace command line utility, I was able to track it down to my global network preferences file… removing it and recreating all my network settings fixed the problem.

On my desktop, the Activity Monitor program refuses to run. The icon bounces up once, then stops. Nothing shows up in any of the system logs, either. I thought I’d use my ktrace trick again, but there’s no good way to launch an application from the command line, I thought…. then I stumbled into running the actual executable program found within the Contents/MacOS directory inside the app directory. Running this at the command line it was immediately obvious what was wrong:

% ktrace Activity\ Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/Activity\ Monitor
dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GraphKit.framework/Versions/A/GraphKit
  Referenced from: /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/Activity Monitor
  Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap
%

For some reason, GraphKit.framework just isn’t on this system! A quick google and 0.00004234 seconds later, I found that someone else had this problem (search down to May 2, 2005 at 10:27am) and resolved it by extracting the framework from the Essentials package on the install DVD. The trick was finding it on the DVD. Here’s the command to do this from the command line (the “sudo pax” command is all one line)

% cd /
% sudo pax -r -z -f "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/Essentials.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz" ./System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GraphKit.framework

This extracts just the missing GraphKit framework from the install disk. Activity Monitor now runs just fine again.