Installing Gephi on Mac OS X Mavericks

[francis_flavin]

I see that a lot of people on the board are having trouble launching Gephi 0.8.2 on Mac OS X, especially with the newer OS X versions like Mavericks. There are plenty of helpful suggestions on the web, but I wanted to put a couple key components together.

The problems are often described as "Gephi hanging on startup," "Gephi freezing on startup," the "graph" window in "overview" mode is blank, and other such things.

The problems seem to stem from a combination of not running Gephi with the right version of Java and not having a "clean" installation.

Here's what I suggest you do:

• 1. Delete your old Gephi.app package, which is presumably in your Applications folder.

• 2. Delete the residual Gephi files from your OS in the Users folder. These are hidden files, so you'll have to un-hide them first. You can un-hide the files by opening a terminal window and typing

  Code: Select all

  chflags nohidden ~/Library/

  Then, navigate to you Users folder, then to /Library/Application Support/ and look for the gephi folder. Delete it. (You can hide the /Library/ folder again if you want.

• 3. Download Java 6 for Mac OS X and install it (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572).

• 4. Install Gephi 0.8.2 again either via you old .dmg file or a via a fresh download from the Gephi website. Presumably, you'll put the Gephi.app package in your Applications folder.

• 5. Edit the Gephi configuration file to use Java 6 rather than Java 7. This file will likely be here: /Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/Resources/gephi/etc/gephi.conf. You can use TextEdit or some other editor to edit the file.

• 6. Edit the file to include this command to point Gephi to your Java 6 environment:

  Code: Select all

  jdkhome="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/"

  and save the updated gephi.conf file. You might want to re-open the file to see that your changes saved.

• 7. Launch Gephi. It should work. To check that Gephi is using Java 6, go to the pull-down menu and click gephi->About. In the pop-up window, you should see this line Java: 1.6.0_65; Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 20.65-b04-466.1 or something indicating that the Java 1.6.0 virtual machine is running.

I had some trouble getting Gephi to run even though I had correctly pointed it to Java 6. The "graph" window wouldn't work, and I often received nullpointer errors. It wasn't until I cleaned out the gephi folder from the Users/Library directory and then did a clean install that I got it to work.

And, I received an additional bonus: I could run dynamic layouts again. At some point, a couple of months ago, I found that Force Atlas 2 often hung during a dynamic application of it. Now, it runs smoothly once again. It's GREAT to have this powerful and eye-popping capability again!


Have fun.

Francis

[WeezyF]

Thank you very much for that awesome post francis.
I was able to get it working without having to delete the old gephi residual files (your step number 2).
And the path to my jdk home file was a bit different and figured i would share it.

Code: Select all

jdkhome="/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home"

Peace, weeeeezyF