Fixing Mac SPSS 18 with Shades of Linux

How to make SPSS 18 do graphics whether it wants to or not …

SPSS isn’t the statistical package I use most often – a few times a month when clients request it. I have SPSS 18 on a Mac and it works fine pretty much, until recently when someone felt the need for a graph produced with SPSS and I received this message:

Warning
Could not start Virtual Machine. Chart will not be drawn.

If you should have this same, sad experience, here is what to do:

1. See what release you are running. You can find this in SPSS by going to the menu at the top left corner that says PASW Statistics 18.0 and selecting the first option that is ABOUT PASW STATISTICS 18.0  – a window will pop-up and say something like PASW Statistics Release 18.0.3 If it is a number less than 18.0.3 you need to update it.

2. You can either register with the SPSS Support site, or if you would rather not register or, like me, cannot be bothered to look up your password, you can skip this step and just use spguest as your login and password

3. Go to this page

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21488075&wv=1

and use your login and password to get to the downloads page. Download and install the patch to upgrade to 18.0.3 for Mac OS X.  This is free. Thank you IBM/SPSS

4. Go back to the same page and download the patch for 18.03.4   (No, I do not know what happened to 1, 2 & 3).

The rest of these instructions are copied from the last part of the README file you will find in the folder when you unzip the patch you just downloaded. I pasted them verbatim because I thought they made an interesting point.

(B)
Download the ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac.zip’ file.
(This file will normally be saved to your ‘Downloads’ folder under your ‘home’ user account. The following instructions assume that this is where the file has been saved.)
Open the Macintosh hard drive icon on your Desktop.
Open the ‘Applications’ folder.
Open the ‘SPSSInc’ folder
Open the ‘PASWStatistics18’ folder.
Locate the ‘PASWStatistics18.0’ program launch icon.
Press and hold the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Click the ‘PASWStatistics18.0’ program launch icon.
Select ‘Show Package Contents’ from the menu options in the pop-up window.
Release the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Open the ‘Contents’ folder.
Open the ‘lib’ folder.
Locate the following file

libspssjvm.dylib

Press and hold the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Click the ‘libspssjvm.dylib’ file icon.
Select ‘Get Info’ from the menu options in the pop-up window.
Release the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Select the triangle toggle next to ‘Name & Extension’.
The contents of the ‘Name & Extension’ box should be as follows:

libspssjvm.dylib

Edit the contents of the ‘Name & Extension’ box to be as follows:

libspssjvm.dylib.orig

Select the ‘x’ in the upper-left corner of the ‘Get Info’ window to close this window.

A window with the following message will appear:

Are you sure you want to change the extension from “.dylib” to “.orig”?

Select the ‘Use .orig’ button.
Minimize the window displaying the ‘lib’ folder.
Open the ‘Downloads’ folder located in your ‘home’ user account.
Locate the ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac.zip’ file.
Double-click on the ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac.zip’ file to extract the contents.
A folder labeled ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac’ should now appear in the ‘Downloads’ folder.
Open the ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac’ folder.
Locate the following file:

libspssjvm.dylib

Press and hold the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Click the ‘libspssjvm.dylib’ file icon.
Select the following menu option from the pop-up window:

Copy “libspssjvm.dylib”

Release the ‘Control’ (Crtl) key on your keyboard.
Minimize the window displaying the ‘IBM SPSS Statistics 18.0.3.4 Hotfix Mac’ folder.
Open the window displaying the ‘lib’ folder.
Select the ‘Edit’ menu option at the top of the window.
Select the ‘Paste Item’ menu option.
The file ‘libspssjvm.dylib’ should now appear in the window (immediately preceding the ‘libspssjvm.dylib.orig’ file).
Close all open windows.
Launch Statistics 18.0.3 and test the behavior that previously failed.
Report results.

———————–

I am happy to report my results as “It now works fine.”

I am also happy because both of the patches were free. I happen to think if you buy software and it quits working that the manufacturer should fix it for free, but they don’t always agree with me on that.

In over 30 years that I have worked with people from IBM, I’ve always been impressed with their customer service. That’s all I know about them. It may be that managers throw naked mole rats at the sales staff every day at 3 p.m. solely for their own amusement.

On the other hand, as I read all of the steps above, it does not strike me that this is particularly user-friendly. I tracked down the spguest work around because I didn’t feel like looking up my password or re-setting it. That was the only bit of a glitch I had, but I can see lots of my clients looking at those instructions and panicking, and well they might because if you accidentally rename the wrong file of about a bajillion similarly named files, this will not work.

Here is the interesting point – the upgrade is free, and it works with no problem, BUT it requires you to invest a little bit of effort to install it and if you don’t have at least a basic degree of technical knowledge,  you might feel uncomfortable just blindly following directions. There is also the possibility that you could rename the wrong file or do something else that will screw things up.

In all of this, it seemed EXACTLY like Linux. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.