Ever since day one of release of Unity 5, I have not been able to successfully run Unity 5 on my Mac, but all other previous versions have run perfectly.
I am running Yosemite 10.10.2.
Unity will start by giving me the “Contacting Licensing Server”, after which I either get the option to Buy Unity or use the Free version. If I check the Free version, I get the crashed app Bug Reporter. Sometimes I do not even get the option to choose Paid or Free. It just goes directly to the Bug Reporter.
I have wiped Unity 5 off my Mac completely several times and each time I’ve re-downloaded Unity 5 from the website just in case there had been patches that might be causing this.
Now several weeks into the release of Unity 5, I’m still not able to load it.
Does anyone have suggestions as to what might be causing this please?
Try creating a new user (Mac) and install U5. If that install works then the problem lies in your other accounts Library folder.
At least a starting point.
Confirmed. Created a new profile on my Mac, and Unity 5 installed and ran perfectly.
Cool, now we just need to figure out what is broken on your regular user account. I’m going to guess at either a preference file or something in the “Application Support” folder (both in your /Library folder)
I’ve deleted everything I can find in both the user/library/preferences & application support folders related to unity, then downloaded and installed fresh. This time when I moved my mouse over the first dialog box that lets you choose free or payed version, the bug reporter came right up. Didn’t even click on anything!
This sounds like one of your user accounts .plist files aren’t working right. And on top of that, deleting the user prefs has made it worse… 
Will look into this somehow if I can. (Don’t actually own a Mac myself, but I do know a little bit on how they work! :))
Sorry, 
at this point it might be easier to migrate to a new profile that works with Unity.
PS It might also be time to reboot to your maintenance OS and repair your disk
Seeing if I can help with the issue now. 
Doing some research on how Mac user accounts work and what files can possibly interfere with Unity. 
Ok…didn’t find much on general account corruption, but it appears several other people have the same problem, check here if you haven’t already: Unity Editor Crashes on launch, Mac OS Yosemite - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions
EDIT: On top of that, if you haven’t tried this already, try the “repair file permissions” utility, of which should be on your mac somewhere. I have read about weird issues from the trash asking for a password prompt to things like this that have been fixed by simply running this. (forgot where it is though, will have to check one of my magazines again when I get home. :))
I ran AppCleaner and dragged the Unity folder to it to completely delete Unity from the Mac. Then I ran Yosemite Cache Cleaner and repaired all file permissions and also cleaned the user caches. Downloaded Unity 5 again, ran the installer and as soon as the first box comes up with the choice for whether you check for Pro or Personal version, the debugger comes up with crash information. I don’t even get to the sign in point. Although my new profile works with Unity 5, it’s not practical to move / install all my other software to the new profile. I’ve never had this problem with previous versions of Unity 3.x - 4.x, nor with ANY other applications, and this profile I’ve had for 5 years and upgraded about 4 versions of Mac OS with.
In that case, showing us the crash info might help. (Macs are essentially Linux/UNIX boxes underneath, so if it’s an .so file doing it, I can probably find info on it. :))
Here is the direct text from the Debugger that comes up each time Unity crashes.
There are many log files on my Mac too, but they all seem to initialize at Mac startup and I cannot find one with history. Perhaps this PDF will shed light.
Also as a side note, I just now decided to try to run Mono Develop 4.0.1 which is in the same folder as the installed Unity 5 app, and it runs fine.
2084394–136278–Unity 5 crash Mac.pdf (145 KB)
Awesome, will take a look!
UPDATE:
Ok, what else do you have on your user profile, other than Unity 5 installed, that might not be on the new one created for testing? 
It might be interfering with Unity 5.
On top of that, the Unity Bug Reporter may have other info I can look at. From reading your other log, it definitely looks like a segfault to me. (Not sure why a user profile reset would fix it though… )
Hmm… I just found something that may fix your user account! it’s going to be a bit tricky though, so bear with me…
Now before you begin, make sure Unity 5 is removed from your machine. Then follow the instructions below. READ THIS ENTIRE POST THOROUGHLY BEFORE YOU BEGIN.
What you need to do (IF your user account is the non-admin one, or you used the guide below this one to create a new admin account):
- First, if your admin account is the one corrupted, see next section first.
- Once you have a working admin account, log into it. Once logged in, go into Users and Groups (Or “Accounts,” I’m not sure which name will apply to you) and locate your user account settings.
- Make sure the lock in the bottom-left is unlocked. Now, before proceeding with the next step, record ALL your account info down. Once you’ve done that (And put it in a place that’s easy to get to) click the minus button to delete the account.
- Upon clicking the minus button, a dialog should pop up asking what to do with your home folder. Just tell it “don’t change the home folder” and click “delete user”
- Now your user account is erased, but your home folder with EVERYTHING in it is still there, just renamed to “XXX(Deleted)” (XXX is your short username) Now locate your home folder (The one for your just deleted user account) and remove the “(Deleted)” text from the file-name. It will probably ask to authenticate, so do that, and it should be renamed to your just deleted account’s name.
- Next, create a new account, and give it ALL the info of the one you just deleted. (Time to dig out what you wrote down earlier! ;)) This includes both long and short usernames, and you must get those right. After doing this, it should pop up a warning about using the existing home folder. If you get this dialog, click “use existing folder” and it should be all set up again.
- Now, simply log in with your newly restored account and test that EVERYTHING works. (It should work as expected) then attempt to re-install Unity 5 and activate it. If it was something in your old user profile messing with unity, this should fix it.
What to do FIRST if your problematic user profile is the admin account. Do this before doing above steps to reset the account:
- First, save all your work, then shut down the Mac.
- Then hold down “Command+S” on the Mac’s keyboard, and while doing so, press the power button. If you see a whole lot of text scrolling by after it powers up, then you’ve gotten to Single-user mode, which is what we need to make the mac run the Setup assistant on next bootup, of which is where we will setup a new admin account.
- Now, enter this command after it’s finished booting. (It should look like a full-screen terminal window, or if you’ve used linux, a virtual console window accessed with the function keys)
mount -uw /
This mounts the system volume, of which allows you to do the next command which is:
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
Once done, reboot.
- Now, the OS X setup assistant should appear instead of your normal login. Use that to create a new admin account, so that you can modify the admin account having issues. I would suggest giving it a name like “repair” or something to distinguish it from your damaged account.
- Made your admin account? Cool! reboot again, log in with that one, and use it to repair the account having issues using the steps above. (In this case, the one crashing Unity 5… ;))
That is all for now. Let me know of any further issues you may have. Also, if you had to create a new admin account, feel free to delete it once you’re finished with it.
EDIT: Made some changes, as some sections didn’t make sense.
EDIT2: Another thing I should mention is the reason why this works in the more extreme cases:
Essentially, yes, your home folder can often be the culprit for apps not running properly, but when writing this guide, the place I got the info from (It was an article on CNET) explained that certain parts of the user profile and the account itself are actually not stored in the home folder, they’re stored in the system directory somewhere. Likewise, if the actual user account files in the system (NOT the home folder!) are the things messing with unity 5, by resetting the user account with the steps above, the problem should go away.
Well I had to bow to just using my newly created profile and go from there. I tried the above, it all worked, but Unity did the same thing. Not sure why it didn’t work but anyways, I’ve got a working Unity now. Of course I have permission problems all over the place due to the new profile not having read-write to various things, but I’ll work that out over time. Just can’t believe that there was THAT big a difference in Unity 5 over all the other versions that worked flawlessly…
Thanks for all the help!!!
Good to know you were able to fix everything up! Probably just a build-up the Mac couldn’t handle.