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

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