18 August 2009

Myst IV does not start on Mac OS X (Permission denied)

If you are a bit slow trying out new games, or is rediscovering the Myst series, you might get this problem when installing on a Mac.
Problem:
You've installed Myst IV Revelation on your Mac but nothing happens when you click the application.
Symptoms:
If you start 'Console' and check your last messages, you'll see something similar to:
..... posix_spawnp("/Applications/Ubisoft/MystIV/myst4.app/myst4", ...): Permission denied
Solution:
The problem is that the executable application does not have the 'execution' permission set within the app.
Open 'Terminal' and go to the directory where you installed Myst IV.
$ cd /Applications/Ubisoft/MystIV/ (in my case)
Here you'll see that the Mac app is really a directory you can enter:
$ ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 4 xxxx admin 136 Aug 18 16:42 _uninst
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 550 Aug 18 16:15 log.txt
drwxr-xr-x 9 xxxx admin 306 Aug 18 17:26 myst4.app
drwxr-xr-x 5 xxxx admin 170 Aug 18 17:29 save
drwxr-xr-x 4 xxxx admin 136 Aug 18 16:15 support
Go down into the directory myst4.app:
$ cd myst4.app
$ ls -l
total 21744
drwxr-xr-x 6 xxxx admin 204 Aug 18 16:15 Contents
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 289 Aug 18 16:15 ares_config.xml
drwxr-xr-x 14 xxxx admin 476 Aug 18 16:42 data
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 238 Aug 18 17:26 detect_config.dsc
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 257636 Aug 18 16:15 libBinkMachO.dylib
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 10866160 Aug 18 16:15 myst4
The real application is 'myst4' which does not have the executable bit set.
Fix this with:
$ chmod +x myst4
$ ls -l myst4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 xxxx admin 10866160 Aug 18 16:15 myst4
Now, start your Myst IV :)

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