I am using a Mac Mini (Late 2009) to run the presentation, and I hooked up the 52″ LG LCD (52LG50) to the MiniDisplay Port using a MiniDisplay Port-to-VGA adaptor. I was seeing horizontal distortions in the picture at 1080p resolution (1920×1080). The display looked fine at lower resolutions.

I switched to a Mini-DVI-to-VGA connector and it solved the issue. I don’t know why the MiniDisiplay Port wasn’t cutting it.

Since that day, I’ve pulled a single hair out everytime my computer crashed. I am now nearly bald.

I’ve opened tickets with Adobe, trashed preferences, reinstalled the suite dozens of times, repaired permissions, and a plethora of other things to try to solve this issue (see the thread about it here). However, the issues have popped up again and again.

Until today.

I finally got so sick of it. I decided to do some hardware testing and found out that a bad stick of RAM may have been the culprit.

The specific errors that I encountered were as follows:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4: frequent message “Could not import the clipboard because an unexpected end-of-file was encountered”, especially when opening files, closing files, or command-tabbing into Photoshop.
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS4: application crash when I:
  • Try to paste something (but not always)
  • Right-click to access a contextual menu, either inside a document, or in the Files window (but not always)
  • Try to access the menus at the top of the screen, particularly ‘Edit’ and ‘Modify’ (but not always

To test the memory, I booted the computer into diagnostic mode. I think this is available in most modern Apple computers. To boot into diagnostic mode, hold down the “D” key on your keyboard at boot time, until the Apple Diagnostic screen shows up. When prompted, run the tests. If you come up with an error message similar to “4MEM/3/40000000″ then you likely have a bad stick of memory.

The exact error message text from the Console application looks like this:

4/1/10 10:42:09 PM [0x0-0xe00e].com.adobe.flash-10.0[197] /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Support/LaunchCFMApp[197] Launch failed with error code -2857 (cfragCFragRsrcErr) for application /Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Adobe Flash CS4.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Flash CS4

The key searchable texts I find in there are:
cfragCFragRsrcErr
Launch failed with error code -2857
/Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Adobe Flash CS4.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Flash CS4

So I did a little snooping and found the answer in a little gem at the bottom of this thread:
How can I learn why an application is failing on launch if no log report is created? (tip of the hat)

So the key to getting past this is to boot OS X into Safe Mode, launch Flash in Safe Mode, exit out of Flash, then reboot into vanilla OS X. To be honest, I’m not even sure what this does, but I’m guessing Flash needs to get past its initial startup phase where it does some file copying and profile creating, and something in the plain ‘ol OS is preventing that from happening.

Some other things I did that may have also impacted the end result:

• Verified all font files using Font Book
• Used Cocktail to clean out all caches as detailed in this post

HTH

I recently encountered an issue with a friend’s Intel iMac. He’s running Mac OS X 10.4.11 and trying to install Safari 4.0. The disk image downloads just fine, and decompresses, but the .pkg file enclosed will not open. The icon is a blank file icon, not the typical .pkg icon one would normally see.

He brought the computer into work so I could take a look at it. The Installer application (/Applications/Utilities/Installer.app on 10.4) is sporting the default document icon, not a fancy Apple-esque hard drive icon. When I try to launch Installer manually, it bounces once in the dock and disappears. Odd…

So I fired up the Console to take a look at error output. Watching the console log, I see the following error listed 1 time, each time I try to launch the application:

2009-11-05 09:05:47.002 Installer [245] Unable to load nib file: PagedInstaller, exiting

Well thats not good! I did some Googling and found a number of smattered articles dealing with the same issue, but with various other installer packages. So I had a pretty strong feeling the problem was not with the Safari 4.0 installer package.

Most of these other sites recommended an archive and reinstall. I believed there was a better solution.

Apple’s Support site was a dead end. Their search function leaves a lot to be desired.

As I looked at the various other results regarding this issue, one theme was prevalent: everyone encountering this issue was running 10.4.11. So, my first inclination was a problem with the 10.4.11 update itself. Perhaps a permissions issue when applying the update through Software Update? So, I did a permissions repair and redownloaded the 10.4.11 update which is, of course, a .pkg file.

So I had to come up with a way to install package files without the Installer.app package installer. Luckily, most everything that can be done in OS X can also be done with a Unix application inside Terminal. So, I downloaded the update (link), fired up my Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and entered the following:
% sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ 10.4.11\ Combined\ Update\ \(Intel\)/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11Intel.pkg -target /
Let’s take a quick look at this command.
sudo: This invokes the application with administrator-level privileges.
installer: This is basically a text version of the Installer app.
-pkg: This tells installer that the target is a package.
/Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ 10.4.11\ Combined\ Update/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11Intel.pkg: This is the path to the installer file. If the download mounted a disk image, this should be correct. If not, modify as necessary.
-target /: This says to use the file system mounted on / as the installation location. That’s our hard drive!

After installing and rebooting the machine, I still could not access the Installer application. So my next thought was to try to get a fresh copy of the Installer application from the package. I downloaded Pacifist from http://www.charlessoft.com and remounted the Combo Update disk image. Inside Pacifist, I clicked “Open Package File” and selected the .pkg. This brings up a listing of all the files in the combo update. I extracted the Installer application, but it still would not run.

So I did some snooping around online, and found that these .nib files contain xml configuration files that specify text, color, images, etc. for windows and menus. I found the path for the PagedInstaller.nib file should be /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/PagedInstaller.nib. I went to another machine that I have here at the office that runs 10.4.11 (its actually a PPC 10.4.11 server), and the directories are all present on that machine. So, I think what happened is, somewhere along the line a software update overwrote the Installer.app directory, instead of updating files inside of it. Whoops! The Intel macs preinstalled with 10.4 were relatively few, as 10.5 came out soonafter the switch to Intel. Apple could easily fix this by updating the 10.4.11 Combo Updater to include the ENTIRE Installer.app directory *hint hint Apple*.

So now I have a dilemma. I have an incomplete Installer.app directory, and no Intel machine with the appropriate files to fix the situation.

However, I do have the reinstall DVD!

Resolution

So I insert the reinstall DVD, open the folder, then open the Applications/Utilities folder on the disc, and lo and behold I found a working copy of Installer!

I copied this app over to the /Applications/Utilities directory and it works like a charm. I then reapplied the 10.4.11 Combo Update simply by double clicking the .pkg file. Oh the little things we take for granted!!! So now Instlaller is working, and patched up to date.