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I am currently running Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) and my copy of Mathematica suddenly started misbehaving. I am not sure what I did to invoke this. The splash screen when Mathematica is launched kept freezing at "Initializing preferences" or some such.

From this SE, I was directed to Wolfram Support. I followed both steps to perform clean start-up but to no avail. I even deleted all folders and re-installed mathematica but that hasn't helped either. I am at a loss right now and was wondering if anyone has encountered this.

dearN
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    See http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/92931 – ilian Sep 05 '15 at 03:39
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    @ilian Led me through a bunch of activation steps and then "The password you entered is not valid." Not fun at all. – dearN Sep 05 '15 at 03:43
  • After deleting everything in ~/.Mathematica, the installation does need to be reactivated, by entering your licensing information. Are you able to launch the frontend and see the activation window? – ilian Sep 05 '15 at 03:54
  • @ilian When I try to launch the frontend, it the spikey just stays at "initializing internal preferences". – dearN Sep 05 '15 at 03:58
  • I don't know what happened recently with mathematica and wolfram but I think my work has just been jeopardized by whatever it is (my fault or Wolfram's fault) – dearN Sep 05 '15 at 04:01
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    If you would like, we could try some troubleshooting in chat. – ilian Sep 05 '15 at 04:08
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    Same here on windows 8.1. I do not know what to do... I followed a step explained above. Still freezing at "Initializing preferences". Any help will be much appreciated –  Sep 10 '15 at 00:50
  • @Gansukh if you read the chat transcript between me and ilian (from a few comments above), you will find a solution described in there. – dearN Sep 10 '15 at 09:22
  • @ilian I know that this has been answered elsewhere but can you post our chat transcript (which was a definitive solution) as an answer? I assume that is allowed (since this is the internet?) – dearN Sep 10 '15 at 15:14

2 Answers2

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Happy to summarize the solution from our chat here as requested, hopefully someone may find it helpful in the short term (I imagine a number of the questions about this issue may be eventually deleted from the site).

  • The root cause was the same as in main question. The steps outlined there should be tried first.

  • In this specific case we needed to restore the Mathematica activation which had been lost by deleting the Licensing folder (so the standalone kernel solution was not applicable any more).

    • Due to separate issues with online activation not working on Linux, we had to do a manual activation from the FrontEnd licensing dialog.
    • To reach that dialog, we had to bypass the hang by deleting the entire Paclets directory first.
Community
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ilian
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Close out of Mathematica. Then, hold down the "Ctrl" and "Shift" keys at the same time. Continue holding them for five seconds as you double click the Mathematica icon and start up the application. Mathematica will then display "Starting with Clean Preferences".

http://forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/2008/Feb/msg00035.html

Bob Brooks
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