JMP, JVM & WTF

So, I am loving my new computer – 12 GB RAM, dual quad-core and a terabyte of space.  Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) plus four VMs with Vista 32, Vista 64, Office 32 and Office 64, plus two enormous monitors so I can run Unix programs on our cluster and monitor that while I am programming in the Windows environment or running SPSS on the Mac on the other side. Learning JMP keeps moving up my to-do list, so I got the SAS download manager for JMP, downloaded it to my computer and got this message:

JVM not found.

I suspected immediately it had something to do with Snow Leopard and the fact that I was right about this helped me not at all in fixing it. I could not find any mention of this problem on the JMP site or anything specific to the SAS download manager or JMP anywhere. However, I did find quite a number of explanations of why one might get a JVM not found error and what to do about it.

I found a number of sites with fixes, all relating to installing Java 1.5 on Snow Leopard, some of which were absolute Greek to me (and I have three graduate degrees, including a doctorate with a specialization in statistics where we are used to Greek! )

This one http://chxor.chxo.com/post/183013153/installing-java-1-5-on-snow-leopard from CHXO Internets was absolutely simple to follow and fixed my problem immediately. Hurray.

[Note to self, as soon as I get a spare minute, as in first thing tomorrow, send $20 for shareware fee to Pacifist , I already have another use for this. ]

When I followed the few steps outlined in the blog post above, the SAS download manager installed, then I installed JMP and all was wonderful.