Running VisualVM on a 32-bit Macbook Pro

If you want/need to run VisualVM on a 32-bit Macbook Pro you'll need to do a couple of things. First, download and install Soy Latte, using these instructions - this gets you a Java 6 JDK/JRE on your 32-bit Macbook Pro. Second, download VisualVM and extract it wherever, e.g. /usr/local/visualvm. If you now try to run VisualVM you'll get the following error message:

$ ./visualvm
./..//platform9/lib/nbexec: line 489: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin/java: Bad CPU type in executable

Oops. After looking at the bin/visualvm script I noticed it is looking for an environment variable named "jdkhome." So the third step is to export an environment variable named 'jdkhome' that points to wherever you installed Soy Latte:

export jdkhome=/usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3

Now run the bin/visualvm script from the command line. Oh, almost forgot to mention that you should also have X11 installed, which it will be by default on Mac OS X Leopard. Now if all went well, you should have VisualVM up and running!