“In order to continue the installation, please close the following application: iTunes”

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is finally out and so far, it seems pretty cool. There are a lot of nice new features that make a great OS even greater and it is will worth the £21 price tag!

I’ve always liked tinkering around with some basic development and creating some small apps for myself that help me do what I want to do. Usually no use to anyone else, but they help me The one thing that put me off trying to develop anything for Mac OS X though was that by the time I came to actually be interested in tinkering with Mac development, Apple had started charging for their Xcode aplication. It was only a small price, but considering how often I’d use it, I wasn’t prepared to purchase it unless I was serious about development. I did notice though, that since upgrading to Lion, Xcode is now free in the Apple App Store, so I jumped on the opportunity before they start charging for it again.

When you download Xcode from the App Store, it downloads an installer to run when you like, rather than installing itself straight away, and it uses the operating system’s Installer program. I did however, come across an interesting problem trying to install it, and it appears I’m not alone in this one…

Before upgrading to Lion, I did a clean install of Snow Leopard to make sure taht nothing would break, so this is a completely fresh system. I’ve never used iTunes since I did the clean install, however while doing the installer, I came across an error that said the following:

In order to continue the installation, please close the following applications:

iTunes

I checked the dock bar, and iTunes wasn’t running at all. I also have an app called QuitsAppsMBI which is a handy tool for quitting applications, nothing on there to say iTunes was running. Lastly, I checked Force Quit to see if there was anything, and there was nothing in there at all.

Not wanting to potentially ruin the installation, I wasn’t sure I wanted to just kill the Installer, so I seeked the help of Google to see if there were any suggestions on what to do. I came across the following post on James Greenhalgh’s blog: http://james.greenhalgh.eu/2011/in-order-to-continue-the-installation-please-close-the-following-application-itunes

This post detals exactly the problem I was having, and a really simple fix! Open up Terminal (found in Applications\Utilities) and type in the following command:

ps x | grep iTunes

This will list all the processes running on your computer with iTunes in the path. This returned the following for me:

174   ??  S     0:00.04 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesHelper -psn_0_57358
2613 s001  S+     0:00.00 grep iTunes

So this shows that the iTunes Helper is still running in the background. To kill this off, you then enter the following command:

kill 174

The first number from the first command is a process ID, so you’re telling it to kill the process with ID 174. Change the 174 to whatever the ID shows as from the first command, and it’ll end the iTunes Helper. After a few seconds, the Xcode installer will clock onto this and continue the installation!

Thanks again to James Greenhalgh for that tip!