This afternoon, I had my first really heavy crash while running Mac OS X on my G4 desktop. That's not bad, considering that I've been running it pretty much full-time for over two years. Browsing the usual sites, it appears that I'm not the first to have this problem, and it looks like Safari is the culprit.
I was downloading a big file, when the machine stopped responding. The mouse cursor still moved around the screen, but nothing happened. To avoid a hard restart, I remotely logged into the G4 as another user from my iBook and, with the command line, killed the login that had frozen. I couldn't log into the frozen account because it complained about not being able to find the root directory. After killing the processes for the other account, I found out that the soft link I had pointing to the home directory for the problem account had been wiped out. I had a soft link at /Users/lee pointing to my real home directory on another partition. I believe that, if the soft link had not been there, my whole home directory would have been hosed. This is the problem with beta software. You just don't know what's going to happen. I'm back to Chimera until this has been resolved. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
