"The helper tool that this preference pane relies on is missing or invalid. Please reinstall Xgrid and try again."

If you have the error shown on this screenshot, this page will explain you how to fix the problem (read below). If you have a different problem, send an email to

 

 

Here are the instructions to fix the problem (these instructions were recently provided by Apple):

• Quit System Preferences (menu 'File-Quit')

• Open the Terminal application (go into the main hard-drive, double-click on the Applications folder, then the Utilities folder)

  

• A new window should open; if not, open one using the menu 'File-New Shell'

• At the prompt, type the following text:

  curl http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xgrid-stanford/install/prefpane-problem/prefpane-fix.txt|sh

  (you can copy and paste that line; be careful to select all the characters starting at 'curl...' and up to '...sh', but no more!)

• Press return to validate the command

• You will be asked for the administrator password; when you type it, no character will appear on the screen, this is normal

• The script should take a few microseconds to run

• In summary, have a look at the screenshot below that shows what should have happened, the green rectangles show what you have to type, the rest is just generated by the script and the shell (it may look slightly different on your screen)

  

• You can then quit Terminal

• Go back to the install page to finish the settings

• If you are curious about what the command does: it downloads a shell script from this web site (this is the url 'http://...'), using the command 'curl'; the contents of this text file is then piped to the 'sh' command, which can understand the stuff written in it; you can check right here the contents of that script, which does the actual job. It simply modifies 3 configuration files that are used by Xgrid and that are not properly installed (it seems that the problem mostly happens when Norton Antivirus is active). Importantly, it only affects Xgrid-specific files, and no system or user files.

  The solution described here was originally published by Apple on the xgrid-users mailing list on this post.