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?
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Quote:"Everyone who mentions LaunchBar in all these comments:
S.T.F.U.
I use and love LaunchBar"
Thanks for your constructive comments. @_@
Let's tell Anand not to use a useful utility even you say you love, just because he's a new (Mac) user.
There's a bright one...
RW - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I'm also a bit confused, is the Machine crashing, (ie, the entire OS is KP'ing), or are the applications crashing?I could see the mouse issue being graphic card/driver related, I'm still a bit confused by the problems you had when installing the 9800 card.
Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Everyone who mentions LaunchBar in all these comments:S.T.F.U.
I use and love LaunchBar, but that comes from being a seasoned Mac user. Someone new to the OS should take time, and not just one month, to really get comfortable with the OS and filesystem before using utilities like this.
So just leave Anand alone already.
d0le - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I would say try Thoth for newsgroups, but unfortunately, Thoth is no longer available. :(Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
more comments directed at 231) if you can find that thread you'll see exactly what repairing permissions is likely to help with. i think the conclusion was that it can help with performance if nothing else.
2) while making sure that the maintenance jobs get run is good and can help, that does not mean that those one-time, freak problems that can be fixed by rebooting don't happen. it's simple and if its the first time something has gone wrong, it might also be the last. if it reoccurs sometime after the reboot you can easily continue with more likely solutions. IOW it can help and it won't hurt.
4) there was this one time, with warcraft, that it started up and all the textures were wrong. i have no clue what could have caused this but every time WC was started, all the textures would be wrong. a log out and back in cause the problem to disappear and i've never seen it since.
sometimes all that's required to never see a problem again is to reset things. but with real problems, yeah, its just a temporary work around
Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Have you tried Launchbar yet? ;)Brazuca - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
FWIW, to run the daily, weekly, monthly scripts, just type:sudo sh /etc/daily [weekly][monthly]
type your password.
jeffosx - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
gotta agree with the person above except that logout and login is the only way to fix some SMB browsing bugs (ie files not seen that are there) that sometimes crop up on win2000 servers we have. Also cache cleaning and reboot also fixed a very annoying disk mounting problem I had (Apple tech support)...Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Comments directed at #231) Very wrong. It is the one thing you really need to do to keep OS X running smoothly
2) Quite right
3) While immature, both programs are rock stable for me. Adium has been so for quite some time.
4) Yup.
5) Another misnomer. SOME OS X utilities are horrendous. Norton anything comes to mind. Cocktail is the best and it should be on every OS X Macintosh.
6) Maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing it would fall inline with a permissions fix.
Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
One thing that surprisingly often fix mouse pointer probs in X is to disconnect the mouse/keyboard from the G5 and then reconnect - no reboot needed...