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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orion27 - Thursday, March 18, 2004 - link
Anand has had three days to upgrade to 10.3.3biggie - Wednesday, March 17, 2004 - link
hmm..it's been a while...apparently its going so well, he doesn't need any more help.Anonymous - Sunday, March 14, 2004 - link
"Man, he must be having a lot of trouble since we haven't heard anything for 10 days"one thing that it could be is he's with the old girlfriend :raises eyebrow:
voline - Sunday, March 14, 2004 - link
when programs begin to lock up or crash, icons display incorrectly, and things get generally flaky under Panther I've found that updating the prebinding sets things back to rights. This has been more of a problem under 10.3 than it was in 10.2. Try this:sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
follow with an immediate restart. hope this helps.
Anonymous - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
Man, he must be having a lot of trouble since we haven't heard anything for 10 days...Anonymous - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&am...The Dood - Wednesday, March 10, 2004 - link
It seems anand has forgotten about macs. :DAnonymous - Tuesday, March 9, 2004 - link
It has been concluded that Repairing permissions is mostly a placebo but:"A properly written app shouldnt hang, slow down, or crash because because it lacks read or write access to a particular file. It should recognize the problem and return a logical error reflecting the inability to access the resource it needs."
And what do you think a well written app will do when it can't read a file it needs to load? Some apps can only write to the console about the problem and then quit.
in the case of cache files if there's a permission error the app may not be able to use the cache and will instead have to get the data from else where, and be slower. and it may not be able to create a new cache file.
so you see, whether or not you can read or write a file can cause problems. as i said, repairing permissions is not entirely a placebo.
neoscsi - Tuesday, March 9, 2004 - link
Come on #44, do we really need the name calling?In defense of the guy that said repairing permissions is a placebo, you have to admit if you think of it LOGICALLY, "bad permissions" shouldnt cause the problems they allegedly do. Permissions just control whether you can read, write, (or read and write) to a file. A properly written app shouldnt hang, slow down, or crash because because it lacks read or write access to a particular file. It should recognize the problem and return a logical error reflecting the inability to access the resource it needs. Despite that, many people claim success with problems by repairing permissions so we must assume either the OS or various apps are written pretty poorly to cause such issues with bad file permissions...
For what its worth, I've been using OS X since 10.0, and currently am the head admin for a company with over 40 OS X machines in four offices across the world; I've never seen a problem that repairing permissions has solved, but I won't go so far as to say it hasn't ever helped anyone... Except of course, if your permissions really are broken and you can't do something simple like erase things off your desktop :)
Anonymous - Tuesday, March 9, 2004 - link
Some of the advice here is just terrible.1) Repairing disk permissions is a placebo.
No it isn't dumbass.
2) You don't need to reboot.
A quick reboot wouldn't hurt a thing. Reboot.
3) Adium and Unison are quite immature. Unfortunately an OS can only do so much to offer stability. There's no nice way to address this problem except to wait for those two programs to mature.
Well you got one thing right.
4) You shouldn't have to logout and back in.
See reboot.
5) Avoid Mac OS X system utilities like the plague. OS X does not need 95% of these utility programs. It can run just fine without them and in fact, using them can just introduce complexity and something extra to go wrong.
Wrong. Cocktail and DiskWarrior are must haves. Moron.
6) Your mouse issue is probably a graphics driver glitch.
No its probably something to do wih the apps that have repeatedly crashed.