Move to Panther
I haven't posted any blogs lately because I have
been preoccupied installing Panther, Apple's latest incarnation of OS X,
undoubtedly the slickest and most powerful desktop OS around. All, however, has
not gone well with the installation. I have been bitten by the notorious
floating mouse pointer hang-up/freeze.
Here's what happens. Everything but the little
mouse pointing arrow freezes for ten to fifteen minutes. You can't click on
anything or enter strokes on the keyboard. However, when the machine wakes up
again, it remembers whatever clicks or keyboard entries occured during the
freeze, and plays them all out in the order they were entered.
Various theories have been advanced to
explain these hang-ups. One popular theory is defragged virtual memory. However,
this is not so plausible in that I have a separate partition on my hard-drive
devoted especially for virtual memory swap files, a partition, moreover, that is
formated in UFS rather than the normal Mac HFS+ format. That takes care of the
defragging at its root, but it didn't take care of the
freezes.
So what
is
causing the freezes? Prima facie, one might suspect the mouse — perhaps a
bug in the mouse kernel extensions, or something on that order. Only problem
here is that I have had a freeze when I hadn't touched the mouse for at least
five minutes. No, the most likely explanation is some kind of network related
issue. I know for a fact that the router on the network does not play nice with
Panther, because I can't access any network services within the network. Web,
ftp, ssh, samba — none of them work using the IP address provided by the
router — although they do work if I DMZ host my IP address in the router
and then use the network's address provided by the IPS. Moreover, all the
hang-ups have occurred in the midst of network related activities, twice when
trying to download files from an ftp server and once while watching
C-SPAN.
One programmer who has occupied
his time over the problem has already suggested that a network stack bug is at
the bottom of the freezes, whatever that means! I should, however, point out
that I have had these freezes in previous incarnations of Mac OS X. I had a rash
of them in Puma, and had started, just recently, to suffer them in Jaguar. But
Panther has been the worst of the lot in this respect. Which is a shame, because
in all other respect, Panther is the best OS I have ever used.
Posted: Sun - July 4, 2004 at 09:15 PM