Hi Everyone,
On Thursday, January 1, 2004, at 05:07 AM, WAMUG Mailing List wrote:
A strange one! For no obvious reason a grey veil dropped down across
the screen which was fully visible but muted. The computer froze and
a message box, white text on black, in English, German and Japanese
said that I needed to restart. A press of the restart button gave a
normal restart and all seems fine.
This did not look in the least like an OSX message and at first I
suspected a virus or similar. Is it perhaps from Unix?
Information would be most welcome!
I had 4 of these events occur on my iBook between Saturday and Tuesday
... post-10.3.2 update and battery update ... and always while surfing
the net in Safari. I think it is a system overload message of some
kind.
I started to call it THE GREY SHROUD OF DEATH ... incidentally don't
you like the way it slips down the screen ... silent but deadly?
On Tuesday night I reinitialised the drive, did a clean install of
everything (including 10.3.2 and battery update) and have not seen the
problem arise thus far (fingers crossed).
Those of us with a unix background might recognise it - I believe it's
Apple's version of a "Kernel Panic". This is where something goes
pear-shaped in the operating system, and there's no easy way to deal
with it, so it just dumps it's load there and then. On a unix system,
you usually get a whole stack of garbage on the screen with words like
"Kernel Panic, dumping 23000 pages.....". I guess Apple realises that
this sort of stuff is meaningless to the user and just cuts to the
chase.
Kernel panics are rare - or they're supposed to be. I've had maybe 5
since I first put 10.2 on my iBook two years ago. With your system the
panics are probably related to the last software update. Maybe
something didn't install quite right, but it didn't tell you. Here's
hoping your problem's solved with a clean install.
Regards,
Paul.
--
Paul W. Mulroney
Logical Developments
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 86 Coolgardie Street
www.logicaldevelopments.com.au BENTLEY WA 6102
Ph: +61 8 9458 3889 ICQ# 154484472 Fax: +61 8 9458 7204
