[GORDYmac]

The other night while I was reinstalling OS 9 (for a completely different reason, I think) I started playing with the OS X Public Beta. I was backing up my files and apps from my OS 9 partition to an external FireWire drive (30GB, Pyro enclosure).

[Background] In OS 9.1 (FireWire 2.7), you simply use the "Put Away" command to unmount a FireWire drive. It leaves the desktop and you can unplug it. When you reconnect it, it pops back up on the desktop.

Anyway, after I backed up everything, I "Put Away" the FireWire drive via the Finder. Well, apparently OS X is a different beast--or at least the Public Beta is. After I "Put Away" the volume, it disappeared from the Finder. Then I unplugged it and--WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!!!???

Immediately the screen filled with a screen I have only seen on PC's as they start up, I can only assume it was the UNIX command line interface, which was lying right below Aqua. Apparently it had been running the whole time, I read tasks I had performed several minutes ago in it.

The screen itself didn't turn black, rather the printed text-white with a black background--just kinda overlayed the GUI. The GUI was nonresponsive, and the last line on the CLI gave a couple of options, one was to "Reboot." I typed "R" and the computer turned off. It restarted fine into OS X PB, but it took a few seconds longer than usual, I guess it was cleaning up whatever I screwed up.

Anyway, while I was impressed that it didn't stop responding altogether, I really, really hated seeing that CLI. I recall picking at Win95 because DOS was hidden just below the surface.

Now, there's no difference. I guess now Apple will spend the next 5 years trying to hide that CLI from users like me.

[Aldie G]

Congratulations. You just saw a 'Kernel Panic'

[gooeynougat]

Originally posted by GORDYmac:
T
Immediately the screen filled with a screen I have only seen on PC's as they start up, I can only assume it was the UNIX command line interface, which was lying right below Aqua. Apparently it had been running the whole time, I read tasks I had performed several minutes ago in it.

The screen itself didn't turn black, rather the printed text-white with a black background--just kinda overlayed the GUI. The GUI was nonresponsive, and the last line on the CLI gave a couple of options, one was to "Reboot." I typed "R" and the computer turned off. It restarted fine into OS X PB, but it took a few seconds longer than usual, I guess it was cleaning up whatever I screwed up.

That is the face of a kernel panic - yeah it sucks, but I've only seen this once in os x. And as driver support evolves, you shouldn't see it much either.

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http://www.torres.cx

[Earth Mk. II]

Well, that's a UNIX based OS for you... sound like you got a kernel panic. The text comes from the OS dumping the last bit of memory on the screen for debugging programs and such. Shouldn't happen too much (if at all) once Apple works out all the kinks in this OS.

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"The robots obey what the children say" -- TMBG

[Guy Incognito]

You really shouldn't be congratulating...this is bad news for Apple.

That was a Kernel panic.

That was what happens when the OS crashes. It's fairly rare.

If you want to get at a terminal window to enter unix commands,
simply go to utilities and click on terminal.

For many, that is a very desirable thing.

[GORDYmac]

I feel so warm inside

Do you know if FireWire Volumes should unmount just as they do in OS 9?

[NeoMac]

You experienced a "kernel panic". Public Beta had issues with external drives. OS X Final shouldn't.

But if it ever happens again, you should save the information and submit it back to Apple. The output tells them what went wrong. They can use it to fix the problem.

For what it is worth, kernel panics are very rare. I've yet to see one in OSX.

[Ghoser777]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
You really shouldn't be congratulating...this is bad news for Apple.

He was talking about the PB, not the final, so it doesn't matter. I don't know how easy it is to cause kernel panics in the final version; i'll just have to wait till saturday to see, but I'm going to assume it's going to require me to load 100MB text files to cauese massive kernel panics again.

F-bacher

[00101001]

this is a known bug with the PB, it doesn't happen in the final

Guy,
Your bad news for anyone who wants to have a real discussion. Amazing how you fit junkyard's MO. People from AI know what I mean.

[NeoMac]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
You really shouldn't be congratulating...this is bad news for Apple.

NOTE: he is using Public Beta, not final. What he experienced is a known driver issue in Public Beta.

Congrats, friend! And welcome to the wonderful world of MS-DOS Version 6.2x which has been installed underneath both Classic Mac OS (all the way to system 1!) and now X. We just cannot shake it yet, but in the future it should be better hidden!

[Scott_H]

Well the current Mac OS crashes ... you just don't see the "DOS" looking stuff on the screen. Instead you get a nice picture of a bomb. I prefer some text once in a blue moon to a bomb picture every month.

[mr_sonicblue]

The Unix CLI is a very very very very VERY VERY VERY VERY important feature of OS X.

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[jeffhot]

This is actually a bit exciting to me. Not that there was an error, that's bad, but that there is an arcane system running behind all that beauty and usability, and it's actually accessible!!!

Reminds me of the good old days in '94 when I got my first computer. DOS was fun to play with, it's only too bad that I had to screw with it, because my only other choices were Windows 3.1, and later 95.

In this situation, we've got the best of both worlds. UNIX under it all is much cooler than DOS, and we actually have the usable Mac OS on top, instead of the atrocious Windows.

But that's all conjecture, ask me again after I've had OS X for a few months.

[Zarafa]

but I'm going to assume it's going to require me to load 100MB text files to cauese massive kernel panics again.

F-bacher

Yikes, OS X will be better than that, I hope. I'd be appalled if a release-quality Unix family member couldn't handle something like that without breaking a sweat. A 100MB text file is pretty paltry. I regularly have logfiles that hit multiple GBs in size.

[GORDYmac]

Thanks for the info guys. Hopefully that was my first and last such Kernel Panic. It's funny, I've seldom been able to restart using the Mac OS 9 error dialogs. In OS X, it worked fine. I guess that's progress for you.

Now I must digress, please don't followup flame-bait. While everyone can have an opinion, noone has to respond.

[Earth Mk. II]

Well, aside from the UNIX cli being way more powerful than DOS ever hopes (hoped? do people still use DOS?) to be, that UNIX layer allows us to get all the free goodies out there on the 'net. sure, to begin with you'll have to compile them yourself, but binaries will become available as time goes on... xFree86 already comes pre-compiled for Darwin, so other useful apps aren't too far off.

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Sittin' around waiting for MY copy of Mac OS X to ship...

[Cipher13]

Gordy, re. your last post, install Macsbug onto Mac OS 9 for the same kind of thing.
Well, ok, it is different, but for your purposes, may as well not be.
Its a low level debugger - the OS crashes, you get dropped into it. "RB" is a reboot, 100% of the time.

Well, except when the USB drivers die.
I hate USB.

Cipher13

[griffman]

Yup, and even the compiling thing can be relatively painless. I'd never compiled anything in my life (heck, I'd never even touched UNIX until OS X PB shipped). But I wanted access to the nicer disk usage commands that I've seen on my ISP - they provide a "human readable" output. So I downloaded and compiled the "GNU file utilities" from gnu.org ... and it worked, first try. I now have a very cool 'df' command, along with color 'ls' and a bunch of other stuff. If I can do it, most any advanced Mac user would be able to handle it.

But the beauty of OS X is that you don't have to. You could own your machine for 10 years and never have to even know what 'df' or 'ls' are. But the fact that there's a full UNIX hiding in the background is going to bring some seriously cool GUI apps to the Mac, and fairly quickly -- see "cronnix", "brickhouse", "nicer", "tinker tool", etc. for currently existing examples.

-rob.

Originally posted by GORDYmac:
Thanks for the info guys. Hopefully that was my first and last such Kernel Panic. It's funny, I've seldom been able to restart using the Mac OS 9 error dialogs. In OS X, it worked fine. I guess that's progress for you.

Not a problem, buddy. And since you're interested in the DOS underpinnings you may want to pick up the great book _DOS and You: The Definitive Guide to A Fantastic OS_. It should help you decipher some of that crazy text in X!

And look at it this way, once you get everything sorted out you will have access to all of the fun games created years back for DOS that PC'ers were playing from Windoze! It's just a quick unplug and plugin of your FireWire drive and you're set.

[theodore]

When people made fun of Windows 95 for crashing to DOS, the primary reason was because DOS is a crappy, hacked-together almost 16-bit operating system with absolutely zero modern OS features while Microsoft was trying to say that Windows 95 was more like a 32-bit OS. As far as the UNIX CLI, yes, it's incredibly powerful. The UNIX CLI is actually a language, you can define functions, variables, control structures, and so on all from the command line. However, I fully agree that the CLI should not be exposed to anyone who doesn't want to see it. But the idea that the UNIX CLI is somehow a relic of the 70s or 80s is wrong. For end users yes, but for software developers no. The UNIX CLI allows you to communicate to UNIX via language. Kind of like how we are all here communicating in English instead of using pictures.

[3dAnimation]

In reply to the "Does Firewire work like in os 9" question:

It's better. I have 20 gig LaCie drive. Plug in: it mounts. Unplug, it unmounts. Don't have to drag to the trash/eject/put away, anything : )

enjoy!
GregM.

[Ghoser777]

Originally posted by Zarafa:
Yikes, OS X will be better than that, I hope. I'd be appalled if a release-quality Unix family member couldn't handle something like that without breaking a sweat. A 100MB text file is pretty paltry. I regularly have logfiles that hit multiple GBs in size.

Yeah, but the problem was that my machine only had 64MB of ram and I was trying to load all 100MB of info in text edit and pico (not at the same, on seperate ocasions). I'm sure it was just a combo of my OS being a beta and not having enough ram to support the OS, let alone the operation.

F-bacher

[PerfectlyNormalBeast]

Kernel panics are actually kinda cool. When a driver does something that corrupts a kernel memory structure, instead of letting the system go on and have other things get messed up later as a result, the kernel actually quits, then tells you in a nice screen exactly what it was doing when the problem occurred. It could be prettier, but... once a kernel detects a problem, the code to display what happened should be as simple as possible, so that the system isn't likely to crash while it's telling you about the crash.

No matter how good an OS is, a bad driver running in kernel space can bring down the system. My Handspring driver on Win2k does this too much. The nice thing about OS X is that less of the drivers need to run in kernel space. My USB Handspring driver, for example, would run in user space and be protected.

So embrace the kernel panic! And hope you never see one!

[tmornini]

Originally posted by Ghoser777:
Yeah, but the problem was that my machine only had 64MB of ram and I was trying to load all 100MB of info in text edit and pico (not at the same, on seperate ocasions). I'm sure it was just a combo of my OS being a beta and not having enough ram to support the OS, let alone the operation.

F-bacher

Nope, not even that. UNIX, and therefore OS X, use disk based virtual memory to handle not-enough-RAM situations. Any modern UNIX (last 15 years or so) would be able to edit a 100MB file with 64MB RAM with little problem, except for the fact that the system would become majorly slow.

You experienced a "Backlash" this is when the computer goes rampant and kills all your GUI functions. MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!