[hotani]

I am so sick of having to reboot when the frikking window manager locks up. There is NO WAY out that I can see and it makes the 'stable rock-solid' unix core virtually useless. (and yes, command+option+escape was dead too)

Yeah, so what if I can telnet in and kill it. That does not matter to 99% of the OS X users out there. I need a button I can push that will just frikking KILL the window manager, restart the finder, do whatever it needs to do to give me back my machine!!! If we can't have that, then this is truly no better than OS 9.

C'mon Apple, give me SOMETHING!!!! I really hate having to hard boot a unix system. This is not a kernel panic. It is a freeze. The bloated over-animated Aqua interface locks up dead cold. Just like OS9, 8, 7, and WINDOWS!

If anyone knows of a secret vulcan death keystroke to restart the finder, I would love to hear it... but I don't think it is out there. This really should not happen; and when it does, there needs to be a way out - that is all I am saying.

[ 03-05-2002: Message edited by: hotani ]

[Scrod]

Why does it matter? Once you restarted the window server all your GUI apps would be killed as well, anyway.

[hotani]

I don't care. logging in again is much less painful that having to hard boot, that is all i want: to be able to kick back to the login screen if necessary and kill all the offending applications in the process.

Of course, I have encountered circumstances where the WM just started acting so wonky, nothing would help. In that case, I guess a reboot is necessary. One such time, I actually was connected and could telnet in to kill apps, but it did no good - the WM was so trashed, nothing was working right and I had to reboot to clear it. This is probably unavoidable, but I don't know.

[undotwa]

Well in Linux if you press CTRL-DEL it exits to BASH.

I think there should be a similar key combo in X.

[starfleetX]

There's no keystroke to kill the window manager.

However, you can ssh into the Mac and execute the "kill" command on its PID.

[hotani]

Originally posted by undotwa:
<STRONG>Well in Linux if you press CTRL-DEL it exits to BASH.

I think there should be a similar key combo in X.</STRONG>

exactly my point.

[moki]

Originally posted by hotani:
<STRONG>I don't care. logging in again is much less painful that having to hard boot, that is all i want: to be able to kick back to the login screen if necessary and kill all the offending applications in the process.
</STRONG>

I wrote a little something a while ago that does this -- you hit the magic key, and it kills the login window. I never released it, though, because I know how to make it work better (technically speaking) but I haven't had the time to do it...

[starfleetX]

Oooh! Ooh! I remember when you mentioned that app before, Andrew! Is there *any* change you could release it... maybe even unsupported like that Classic buffering app?? Pleeeeaaaasse??

[a holck]

I had a lot of those freezes lately.

But just as worse, when in FCP 3 the system sometimes reverts to the blue screen just after the login: ALL APPS ARE GONE IN A SPLIT SEC.
The computer takes me to a fresh desktop! All data in memory is lost.

I'm soooooooooo close going back to os 9.2.2

[Big Mac]

To the original poster, I really have to believe something's wrong with your box. OS X never acts in that manner on my machines. There's an acute issue there that shouldn't be blamed on OS X itself.

On the other hand, I'm still trying to solve the rare zombie application syndrome that has been experienced on two separate iBooks. The programs still seem to be alive but can't be killed. There's no way to restart or log-out. I've also encountered cases in which Classic obscures the native environment after crashing, to the extent that all native windows are covered by the screwed over Classic. The machine is still alive, but unless and until one can reach the Force Quit button, there's nothing to really do.

[ 03-05-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]

[red rocket]

I don't think those freezes are in any way a hardware problem. There's simply too many people on different machines experiencing them for that to be the case. If you haven't had a freeze yet, you probably will get one sooner or later.
On my Rev D iMac, pressing the power button on the machine does in fact restart the WM - unfortunately not every time. Furthermore, I'm still having to reboot afterwards, because otherwise the problem will just reappear in a couple of minutes. But least I don't have to do a hard restart.
As far as I'm concerned, this is by far the most irritating thing about the OS, and it's really Apple's responsibility to fix it.
By fixing I mean they should stop the freezes from happening in the first place. Short of that, I believe a shutdown key combo would be the correct thing to implement.

[edddeduck]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
<STRONG>To the original poster, I really have to believe something's wrong with your box. OS X never acts in that manner on my machines. There's an acute issue there that shouldn't be blamed on OS X itself.

On the other hand, I'm still trying to solve the rare zombie application syndrome that has been experienced on two separate iBooks. The programs still seem to be alive but can't be killed. There's no way to restart or log-out. I've also encountered cases in which Classic obscures the native environment after crashing, to the extent that all native windows are covered by the screwed over Classic. The machine is still alive, but unless and until one can reach the Force Quit button, there's nothing to really do.

[ 03-05-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</STRONG>

1. Reinstall the apps that are doing this..
2. Always have a terminal window open. (Kill -9 PID)
You get the PID for an app by looking at the app using the top command.

[BlackGriffen]

Originally posted by edddeduck:
<STRONG>

1. Reinstall the apps that are doing this..
2. Always have a terminal window open. (Kill -9 PID)
You get the PID for an app by looking at the app using the top command.</STRONG>

Would you believe that doesn't even work? When I first upgraded to X.1, I would get that problem almost daily. I couldn't force quit, kill -9, nothing. Here's a list of symptoms I had:

1) it only seemed to effect Carbon apps, Cocoa apps would still launch and run fine.
2) I thought that it only happened soon after login, but I think that the cause was launching several Carbon apps in rapid succession (I was launching Opera, iTunes, and Mozilla within a half second of each other from the dock).
3) Once it happened, any Carbon app I tried to launch would just join the zombies.
4) The culprits all had PIDs but there was no way to get rid of them short of cmd-opt-esc

I haven't had the problem lately (knock on wood), especially since I've upgraded, but that doesn't mean I'm not still wary of it. My guess is that as long as you don't launch carbon apps in rapid succession you should be fine.

BlackGriffen

[DannyVTim]

Pressing Control-Command-PowerButton will cause the system to flush the IO buffers and unmount the filesytem cleanly and the system will reboot.

Apple already put what you wanted in the system.

[BR549]

Pressing "Control-Command-PowerButton" (I'm assuming you mean the power button on the keyboard) doesn't always work when the entire screen has been taken over by an app such as a game. With both Return to Castle Wolf. Demo and the OttoMatic demo, whenever I started them, the screen faded to black, and then nothing. No sound, no response at all. I was forced to do a hard reboot by pressing the reset button on the front of the my G4.

Some way to kill/reset/restart the window manager (similar to Linux) would be very helpful...

[malvolio]

Sounds like what has been happening to my wife lately. It's a total GUI freeze, right? Cursor frozen, can bring up Force Quit screen via the 3-finger salute, but forcing everything listed there to quit, and even restarting the Finder, does no good. She's had to do a hard reboot every time.
My wife uses Classic a lot, and I don't. So that may be a critical factor.
I'll have to try the command-control-power button procedure with our slot-loading iMac. I would use the power button right on the machine itself, correct?

[eno]

This very topic has been discussed in another thread (the one about 10.2 news, wherein people speculate that one of WinXPs best features is the ability to switch users without logging out).

It's inarguable that Mac OS X needs the capability to kill/relaunch the window manager. Hard resets on UNIX boxes are not a pretty sight, and they can easily lead to nasty disk corruption. And anyone who says, "there must be something wrong with your machine, mine never freezes" is a pompous f-wit who doesn't know the first thing about computers. Things DO go wrong, even if they don't go wrong often, and the OS should do all it can to minimise the inconvenience and damage, no matter how little or infrequent it is.

[Scrod]

Originally posted by eno:
<STRONG>Things DO go wrong, even if they don't go wrong often, and the OS should do all it can to minimise the inconvenience and damage, no matter how little or infrequent it is.</STRONG>

I'll bet the person who was responsible for putting the pinhole reset switch on the first generation iMacs had something to do with this.

[Big Mac]

To clarify a point from my previous post, when I said something must have been wrong with the original poster's "box," I didn't mean to imply a hardware problem but a software issue instead. I realize that things do go wrong, but I also maintain that an OS X machine shouldn't normally act nearly as poorly as what was described. I've never seen such severe symptoms on the many machines I support.

Concerning zombie processes, the Dock and top still see the processes, but Force Quit doesn't. There's no way to kill them, even with a kill -9. Any new applications launch usually fail to do so completely. Killing the Window Manager logs out but not back in, leaving the machine in a infinite disc spinning loop.

Finally, to the poster who suggested using Command+Control+Power, I'm wondering how that could be accomplished using the Pro Keyboard. I know that Control+Eject prompts the Shutdown dialog, Command+Control+Eject prompts a soft reboot, and Command+Option+Control+Eject prompts a soft shutdown. Yet, those commands only work when the machine can be gracefully shutdown - they're not forced resets. I'm wondering if the poster in question is saying that one can use the physical power on/off button in conjunction with the keystroke to affect a forced reset. I don't have a new world desktop to test this out on since I'm at home right now.

[ 03-05-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]

[ 03-05-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]

[rw]

Originally posted by moki:
<STRONG>

I wrote a little something a while ago that does this -- you hit the magic key, and it kills the login window. I never released it, though, because I know how to make it work better (technically speaking) but I haven't had the time to do it...</STRONG>

So are you just posting this to tease us then? Looks like there's at least one person here who'd pay you a buck to finish the app (technically speaking) and release it.

[Cipher13]

Apple-Power (or for those without power buttons, the interrupt switch), should drop you to the CLI...

[Charles Bouldin]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
<STRONG>Apple-Power (or for those without power buttons, the interrupt switch), should drop you to the CLI...</STRONG>

I don't have much wisdom to add, except that if you have another machine, SSH into the locked up machine and try to kill the offending processes. My wish, however, is to do this without TWO computers, ie, I think OSX should have "virtual terminals" like linux. This is the best crash recovery of last resort that I know of and is sometimes useful for other reasons.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
<STRONG>Apple-Power (or for those without power buttons, the interrupt switch), should drop you to the CLI...</STRONG>

Indeed it should, but in OS X, it doesn't. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's said that to Apple on their feedback page. It should drop you in to the CLI, preferably without killing the window manager or "loginwindow.app" (maybe just suspend all the processes) so that the user can do "ps -auxc" or "top -du" and kill the offending processes. We could then type "continue" or "g" to get back to the GUI.

A hard lockup may not mean that the window manager or Darwin itself has crashed, it could be a malicious program that forks new processes of itself inside an infinite loop. There was one of them running in our uni computer labs the other day. Once that program/process has been killed off, the machine will return to normal (well, there's bound to be a lot of paging out and back in going on, but more or less normal once that's calmed down!)

We shouldn't have to go searching for a machine, with suitable SSH client software, on the network.

[kupan787]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
<STRONG>Apple-Power (or for those without power buttons, the interrupt switch), should drop you to the CLI...</STRONG>

So is the interrupt switch the big button, the medium sized button, or the pin hole button on the front of my Quicksilver?

Thanks,
Ben

[starfleetX]

Originally posted by kupan787:
<STRONG>So is the interrupt switch the big button, the medium sized button, or the pin hole button on the front of my Quicksilver?</STRONG>

He said it should, but it doesn't. That's just wishful thinking.

[P]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
<STRONG>
On the other hand, I'm still trying to solve the rare zombie application syndrome that has been experienced on two separate iBooks. The programs still seem to be alive but can't be killed. There's no way to restart or log-out. I've also encountered cases in which Classic obscures the native environment after crashing, to the extent that all native windows are covered by the screwed over Classic. The machine is still alive, but unless and until one can reach the Force Quit button, there's nothing to really do.

</STRONG>

Do these iBooks use a Firewire harddrive? There is a bug in the driver for Firewire HDs that can cause something like this, the OS keeps waiting for a read from the drive and nothing that affects that drive will work. Pulling the plug on the FW HD will work. That partition will need fsck, but your boot partition will be OK.

[DannyVTim]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
<STRONG>
Finally, to the poster who suggested using Command+Control+Power, I'm wondering how that could be accomplished using the Pro Keyboard. I know that Control+Eject prompts the Shutdown dialog, Command+Control+Eject prompts a soft reboot, and Command+Option+Control+Eject prompts a soft shutdown. Yet, those commands only work when the machine can be gracefully shutdown - they're not forced resets. I'm wondering if the poster in question is saying that one can use the physical power on/off button in conjunction with the keystroke to affect a forced reset. I don't have a new world desktop to test this out on since I'm at home right now.</STRONG>

I'm not sure what the keys would accomplish on a Pro keyboard. I have a MacAlley replacement for my B&W G3, which has a power button on the keyboard itself just as the original did. I have only experienced one lockup and I doubt Apple nor anyone will be able to add in a key combo for a complete lockup, which by definition seems to mean a something other than an app has caused an unrecoverable problem. I have linux boxes and a process with chew up time and the key combo will bring one back to the login screen, but there is no key combo for a lockup. Fortunitly, I've never had a lock up on a Linux box. As far as X goes, this works if I'm getting no response from the system other than the spinning wheel and of course doesn't work with a lock up. BTW, rebooting the system is better since dumping the window server and apps without flushing the IO buffers will more then likely lead to a disk problem. I often reboot Linux boxes after the login screen returns anyway, so Apple's method saves me a step.