[Chimera-users] Installing Chimera on Mac

Conrad Huang conrad at cgl.ucsf.edu
Mon Feb 11 09:02:15 PST 2013


On the Mac, Chimera wants to save user preferences information in a 
".chimera" folder in your home directory.  There are a few possible 
reasons why Chimera is complaining that it cannot do so.

First, you need to confirm that Chimera is finding your home folder. 
Start up Terminal (Application -> Utilities) window and type "echo 
$HOME".  That's the path to the folder that Chimera will start with.  It 
should look something like "/Users/conrad".

Next, you should check whether the Chimera folder exists by opening a 
Finder window, click the Go->Go to Folder... menu item, enter 
"/Users/conrad/.chimera" (without the quotes and replacing /Users/conrad 
with whatever your $HOME value is) into the text field, and click Go. 
If Finder complains that "The folder can't be found", you should check 
the "Sharing & Permissions" information on your home folder to make sure 
that you have write permission.  If the Chimera folder exists, you 
should check the permissions on it as well as the "preferences" file in 
the folder; you need write permission for both.  My guess is that 
somehow you got a Chimera folder there already, owned by a different 
user.  The easiest "fix" is just to remove the entire .chimera folder 
and start over.

Good luck.

Conrad

On 2/8/13 12:58 PM, Corey Fugate wrote:
> Hi, I'm trying to run Chimera on my Mac.  I put it in the
> Applications folder, but when I open the program a dialogue appears
> that says, "Cannot find writable directory for saving preferences
> file".  How can I fix this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Corey
>
>
> _______________________________________________ Chimera-users mailing
> list Chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
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