installing on Apple chips (m1/m2)

Jalview Discussion
1

I’m trying to install on an Apple (mac) m2 chip. The directions on the Download page don’t work (e.g., The application cannot be opened for an unexpected reason, error=Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-10669 “(null)” UserInfo={_LSLine=4101, _LSFunction=_LSOpenStuffCallLocal}) and I can’t find directions when I read the FAQ or search.
Would someone point me to directions on installing for Apple chips?

2

Hi Dave,

I suspect your M2 mac doesn’t yet have “Rosetta 2” installed which allows the underlying intel compiled Java that is bundled with the Jalview 2.11.2.0 installer to run on Apple Silicon. For some reason (I can think of some possibilities) macOS isn’t opening the “Install Rosetta 2?” dialog that it normally would in this situation.

This page, How to Install Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs, describes how to install Rosetta without the dialog but in short, if you run

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

in a Terminal window it should install. I’m not sure if you’d need to reboot before it kicks in but if Jalview doesn’t launch properly after that, try a reboot before trying again.

You’ll be pleased to hear that our next release of Jalview (coming soon!) will include a native Apple Silicon version (which provides some performance improvements – as well as being the future of macOS!). So as an alternative suggestion to the above, you could download the Test version of Jalview’s next release from https://www.jalview.org/development/jalview_test/ (you should see a “macOS aarch64” option to download). This will install alongside (not over) your normal Jalview application so we’d strongly suggest you install the next release when it’s available and switch to using that to get timely automatic updates.

Please let us know how you get on – I’d like to know if either of the above suggestions work out for the (somewhat vague) error message macOS is giving!

Ben

PS I develop on an M1 mac (and Linux) which had Rosetta installed from the outset – I’ve only just found out that newer macs are shipping without Rosetta pre-installed, hence the instructions don’t mention this yet.

3

I should have mentioned that I’d rather not install Rosetta (I have M2).
But, the test version is what I wanted. Thanks for the help.

4

Hi there Dave - just to say there’s now a native Apple Silicon installation for Jalview - this should give you a Rosetta 2 free Jalview experience :slight_smile: