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.
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.
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 :)
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.
I had a problem once with a disappearing cursor, turned out to be a USB hub issue - I have millions of them , cascading left ritgh and centre out of stuff. One of them was somewhat impure. As regards drivers, I've used both M$ and Logitech mice, with and without drivers. You don't need a driver for any mouse on OSX, the drivers just add product-specific features.
I second #37's suggestion to relaunch the Finder. It is the least stable part of OS X in my experience. It's actually less stable than it was in OS 9 but a lot easier to relaunch than the restart needed in OS 9. Just:
Command(Apple) + Option(alt) + Escape
OS 9's Finder would start to get flakey after renaming a few hundred files - in OS X it only takes 100 or so. Hogwasher is also apt to cause instability in the Finder... it, in my opinion, is by far the most intuitive Mac newsreader... and less invasive than Unison. Thoth is the poster's choice (because of the availability of auto-posters) - Hog the reader's.
Find it here: www.asar.com
Finally, there is a campaign running to try to keep Thoth alive by prepaying for updates - you'll find talk in the .mac newsgroups.
About the disappearing mouse cursor, instead of rebooting the whole computer you can try only rebooting the Finder. Amazing notion, but the desktop in OSX is only an application that can be relaunched. Your apps won't be affected.
As for the instability, Adium is probably to blame.
just wondering, is anand using a 3rd party mouse driver or usb overdrive or something? i know the ms and logitech drivers have caused some problems for people in the past.
My point was, I think a new user such as Anand having a utility like this would impair them from really learning the ins and outs of the file system, GUI, etc. Don't you think it better to learn how the guts of the beast work before switching over to shortcuts and 3rd party tools? PARTICULARLY someone who is in the position of REVIEWING the OS for a large audience of readers?
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.
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...
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.
1) 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
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)...
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...
1) Repairing disk permissions is a placebo. I know there are people that swear by it, and they always chime in to threads like this. But that's not the problem. If only it were that simple.
2) You don't need to reboot. What might be of help is to know what your usage patterns are like. Mac OS X runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance logs at 6:30 pm (daily), 4:30 am (weekly) and 5:30 am (monthly). Do you have your computer on at this time? If not, those weekly and monthly logs may not be running. They are called by the cron daemon and are listed in /etc/crontab. You can deal with this maintenance script-not-executing issue by executing the scripts yourself as Damien has pointed out, or by setting up anacron to run these tasks appropriately. Anacron is like cron, except it handles downtime nicely. With all this said, I don't think doing this maintenance would have prevented the problems you've outlined.
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.
4) You shouldn't have to logout and back in. That might lessen the effects of a problem, but it's not a fix. It's a behavioral adjustment to work around the problem. The ONLY exception to this rule is with FileVault-enabled, in which case logging out is a feature (once logged-out, the home directory becomes a simple encrypted sparse image).
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.
6) Your mouse issue is probably a graphics driver glitch. I wouldn't bet on it being fixed in 10.3.3, but there will be new drivers in that release of OS X. So it might just be addressed and fixed then. Apple has a website at http://bugreport.apple.com that you can use to fill out a detailed bug report.
I'd also recommend investing in DiskWarrior 3.01...a preventive maintenance app that will rebuild a pristine OS directory (not a patch). Many savvy Mac users swear by DiskWarrior (alsoft.com) to help keep their Mac humming along. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility can't hurt and trashing specific app preferences may be a good move as well.
Hrm.. I've had that mouse problem before too (with my dual monitors). If I remember it disappeared before my upgrade to 10.3. I figured it was just a bug that got squashed somewhere, but I guess not. All that is required is a logout/login, but ya, it is rather frustrating.
My current "odd problem" is icons being switched and some times corrupted. Another harmless bug that goes away at restart. Loose one problem, gain another. Maybe my system is just trying to tell me that 3+ weeks of heavy use is too many between restarts.
I was going to post this elsewhere, as I have never had a very stable system in any Mac OS. My days as a film editing assistant and editing were constant system troubleshooting, and restarting numerous times a day has always been my computing norm with any version of mac classic OS.
OS X brought some stability, but with Kernel Panics, lost network connections that froze the system, and some sluggish performance that required rebooting to clean out -- that was not wünderbar. Add to that some required video editing in which a reboot would get cleaner video captures.
But the advances with OS X are now at the point (10.3.2, Dual 1 gig G4) where I power use the system with impunity! Currently running on 26 days, 9 hours without reboot while doing numerous processing endeavors: Final Cut Pro capture, editing, and output; complex DVD creation and burning; daily video chatting with AIM 5.5 and iChat Beta; Photoshop; Web design; Syncing with Treo; much network services (downloads and uploads) in background; HALO and Unreal playing in full screen or window; numerous DVD ripping and burning; some Garage Band creativity; voice operating computer with the built-in Speech Recognition -- much of the above daily for the past 26 days without any system hiccup, though some infrequent software quitting.
I don't think I've ever gone very long without some system issue. Though now I'll install that security update from a few days ago, which requires a restart...
The one thing I've noticed about application in OS X: sometimes preference files get corrupted. Regarding Unison, try trashing your prefs and seeing if that helps. May fix your Adium problems as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's your uptime? It looks like you would need a reboot. I know this sounds silly, but OSX is not as bullet proof as some other Unices, mainly because it was made with the average user in mind. I would try logout/logon first though, sometime, some application goes wild and it can only be killed by logging out. If that application is on system level, reboot is the only option.
While OS X is like any other modern OS in terms of memory protection, it's also like any other modern OS in that things tend to cascade. If Adium started having some major issues, there's always the chance that it caused the rest of the system to go haywire too; it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen misbehaving programs to try to take the rest of the system with them. As long as the system stays stable after the reboot though, I think you'll be fine.
PS Your 1 month is over this Friday; any hint on the verdict? ;-)
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53 Comments
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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.
maxplanar - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
I had a problem once with a disappearing cursor, turned out to be a USB hub issue - I have millions of them , cascading left ritgh and centre out of stuff. One of them was somewhat impure. As regards drivers, I've used both M$ and Logitech mice, with and without drivers. You don't need a driver for any mouse on OSX, the drivers just add product-specific features.jeffosx - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Hasnt the final verdict already been reached? There was mention of an Apple HW section on Anandtech. Dont you need a Mac for that purpose?Anonymous - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
hmm...just say Anand, a tad easier (-:OoTLink - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I can hardly wait for this week to end to hear Mr. Shrimpi's final verdict O_O it's begining to make me wonder hehe.Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I second #37's suggestion to relaunch the Finder. It is the least stable part of OS X in my experience. It's actually less stable than it was in OS 9 but a lot easier to relaunch than the restart needed in OS 9. Just:Command(Apple) + Option(alt) + Escape
OS 9's Finder would start to get flakey after renaming a few hundred files - in OS X it only takes 100 or so. Hogwasher is also apt to cause instability in the Finder... it, in my opinion, is by far the most intuitive Mac newsreader... and less invasive than Unison. Thoth is the poster's choice (because of the availability of auto-posters) - Hog the reader's.
Find it here: www.asar.com
Finally, there is a campaign running to try to keep Thoth alive by prepaying for updates - you'll find talk in the .mac newsgroups.
wassup4u2 - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Hey I really like the 'AT News Updates'... they help keep boring classes interesting ;-)the best - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
RELAUNCH THE FINDER.About the disappearing mouse cursor, instead of rebooting the whole computer you can try only rebooting the Finder. Amazing notion, but the desktop in OSX is only an application that can be relaunched. Your apps won't be affected.
As for the instability, Adium is probably to blame.
japtor - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
just wondering, is anand using a 3rd party mouse driver or usb overdrive or something? i know the ms and logitech drivers have caused some problems for people in the past.Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Sorry for the DP.My point was, I think a new user such as Anand having a utility like this would impair them from really learning the ins and outs of the file system, GUI, etc. Don't you think it better to learn how the guts of the beast work before switching over to shortcuts and 3rd party tools? PARTICULARLY someone who is in the position of REVIEWING the OS for a large audience of readers?
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.
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...Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Some of the advice here is just terrible.1) Repairing disk permissions is a placebo. I know there are people that swear by it, and they always chime in to threads like this. But that's not the problem. If only it were that simple.
2) You don't need to reboot. What might be of help is to know what your usage patterns are like. Mac OS X runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance logs at 6:30 pm (daily), 4:30 am (weekly) and 5:30 am (monthly). Do you have your computer on at this time? If not, those weekly and monthly logs may not be running. They are called by the cron daemon and are listed in /etc/crontab. You can deal with this maintenance script-not-executing issue by executing the scripts yourself as Damien has pointed out, or by setting up anacron to run these tasks appropriately. Anacron is like cron, except it handles downtime nicely. With all this said, I don't think doing this maintenance would have prevented the problems you've outlined.
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.
4) You shouldn't have to logout and back in. That might lessen the effects of a problem, but it's not a fix. It's a behavioral adjustment to work around the problem. The ONLY exception to this rule is with FileVault-enabled, in which case logging out is a feature (once logged-out, the home directory becomes a simple encrypted sparse image).
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.
6) Your mouse issue is probably a graphics driver glitch. I wouldn't bet on it being fixed in 10.3.3, but there will be new drivers in that release of OS X. So it might just be addressed and fixed then. Apple has a website at http://bugreport.apple.com that you can use to fill out a detailed bug report.
B Rich - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I'd also recommend investing in DiskWarrior 3.01...a preventive maintenance app that will rebuild a pristine OS directory (not a patch). Many savvy Mac users swear by DiskWarrior (alsoft.com) to help keep their Mac humming along. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility can't hurt and trashing specific app preferences may be a good move as well.Terry Thiel - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Run the utility Cocktail which clears caches, does prebinding, and repairs permissions all in one go the reboot.http://www.macosxcocktail.com/
Adam K - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Yeah Anand, it is pretty hard to directly diagnose your problem.Of course, we are assuming that you have rebooted (the usual fix).
Do you think that the Adium client is causing the problem? Have you tried unistalling it?
Ray - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Wait is your G5 crashing (OS X freezing or what ever you want to call it) Or is it just the mouse pointer issue and those other Apps?Seth - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Hrm.. I've had that mouse problem before too (with my dual monitors). If I remember it disappeared before my upgrade to 10.3. I figured it was just a bug that got squashed somewhere, but I guess not. All that is required is a logout/login, but ya, it is rather frustrating.My current "odd problem" is icons being switched and some times corrupted. Another harmless bug that goes away at restart. Loose one problem, gain another. Maybe my system is just trying to tell me that 3+ weeks of heavy use is too many between restarts.
mugwump - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I was going to post this elsewhere, as I have never had a very stable system in any Mac OS. My days as a film editing assistant and editing were constant system troubleshooting, and restarting numerous times a day has always been my computing norm with any version of mac classic OS.OS X brought some stability, but with Kernel Panics, lost network connections that froze the system, and some sluggish performance that required rebooting to clean out -- that was not wünderbar. Add to that some required video editing in which a reboot would get cleaner video captures.
But the advances with OS X are now at the point (10.3.2, Dual 1 gig G4) where I power use the system with impunity! Currently running on 26 days, 9 hours without reboot while doing numerous processing endeavors: Final Cut Pro capture, editing, and output; complex DVD creation and burning; daily video chatting with AIM 5.5 and iChat Beta; Photoshop; Web design; Syncing with Treo; much network services (downloads and uploads) in background; HALO and Unreal playing in full screen or window; numerous DVD ripping and burning; some Garage Band creativity; voice operating computer with the built-in Speech Recognition -- much of the above daily for the past 26 days without any system hiccup, though some infrequent software quitting.
I don't think I've ever gone very long without some system issue. Though now I'll install that security update from a few days ago, which requires a restart...
colomb - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
The one thing I've noticed about application in OS X: sometimes preference files get corrupted. Regarding Unison, try trashing your prefs and seeing if that helps. May fix your Adium problems as well.Damien Sorresso - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Log out and then back in. Also, try clearing out your memory once in a while by entering the following command in the terminal.sudo periodic weekly
Enter your administrator password at the prompt.
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.
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.
jeffosx - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
the other thing to do is repair permissions (disk utility)...Jasenko - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
What's your uptime?It looks like you would need a reboot. I know this sounds silly, but OSX is not as bullet proof as some other Unices, mainly because it was made with the average user in mind. I would try logout/logon first though, sometime, some application goes wild and it can only be killed by logging out. If that application is on system level, reboot is the only option.
ViRGE - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
While OS X is like any other modern OS in terms of memory protection, it's also like any other modern OS in that things tend to cascade. If Adium started having some major issues, there's always the chance that it caused the rest of the system to go haywire too; it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen misbehaving programs to try to take the rest of the system with them. As long as the system stays stable after the reboot though, I think you'll be fine.PS Your 1 month is over this Friday; any hint on the verdict? ;-)