The G5 has been crashing a lot lately; I complained about Adium being unstable, well it got to the point where I had to move back to an older build of the Alpha. Granted that we are talking about an alpha build of an application and the fact that it can run 24/7 normally without problems is pretty impressive.
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
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Ken - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
I concur with the recommendation of NT about checking the Console. There's a pop-out list of all the system logs, crash logs, etc, that's being logged by the OS, and you can commonly go to System Log and see a minute by minute breakdown as it occurs. Use the tools.Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Log out and log back in.I've had the mouse pointer problem once or twice in the past. Logging out seems to help.
tl - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
I've never had Adium crash on me. I update to a new alpha build every week or two. YMMV, I suppose.Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Unison and Adium are both very beta and buggy apps. Try Proteus for IM and Thoth for newsreading.Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Mac programs crashing? NO WAY!NT - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
I would definitely recommend checking out the console. It should tell you if there's a permissions error or if there is a particular app with problems.Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
the systems uptime has less to do with whether or not a reboot would help than the bugs that the running applications have and how long they've been running. a log out should take care most anything they could do. but i normally hate to do that too as i dont like to quit my apps. it means i have to save stuff, quit apps, and then restart them all again. way too much of a hassle.Anonymous - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
very basic mac trouble shooting:a test user account can often help diagnosing whether problems are in the system domain or in the user domain.
if it's in the user domain then corrupted user preferences might be the problem : http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031...
the console can be of help diagnosing exactly what's going wrong. use it to check the logs.
there's a thread over at arstechnica somewhere (couldn't find it) questioning the validity of repairing permissions as a way to fix problems. but it can't hurt.
Bill Stevenson - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
I have been using Unision 1.0.2 with relatively good success. It does seem to choke sometimes when pulling down a lot of data, but you can play with the caching settings a bit.It is a 1.0 product, you know, but it is from Panic, so it will rapidly improve. They are software gods.
thePurpleGiant - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Unison has always been crashy for me, I am surprised it hasn't crashed on you since day one! Same deal with the Adium alpha's, I am staying away until a final release.No idea about your mouse pointer, just a random issue that popped up. I wouldn't imagine it has anything to do with Adium and Unison, since I find these quite unstable anyway.