17 Apr 2002 lindsey   » (Journeyer)

Grr

I had to reboot my MacOS X machine because I couldn't get to a real terminal and clean things up.

It somehow went nuts; I couldn't start a shell, and, even in the shell window that I did have, some commands didn't seem to work; e.g., netstat did work, ping didn't work, ps didn't work. I couldn't start anything new from the "Dock", and the "Finder" program (which seems to be somehow related to a window manager) was only partially working -- as if some of its threads had locked up.

Now, in an X11 world, I'd just switch over to a real terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1, on a suitably-configured FreeBSD or Linux system) kill the offending programs, and restart the UI. But in MacOS X I had to (a) manually "force kill" each of the programs (Ctrl-Option-Esc), then (b) restart.

Fortunately, the force-kill thing worked reliably. It seems to behave like a SIGKILL (`kill -9'). And there was enough of the environment still running to shutdown cleanly, so at least I didn't have to remove the battery.

Apple's mother-may-I approach to user environments runs contrary to my Unix, remount-readonly, kill-and-restart-as-necessary, anything-but-reboot way.

I want a text console!

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!