I Found the first program that locks up my mac!

It only took 2 days, but I found an app that caused my entire OS to lock up.

Celestia caused my mac mini to freeze hard, requiring a power off. It ran for about 5 seconds, then the screen froze (cursor still moved, but no response from the dock) and then the cursor disappeared altogether.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ <--- the offending application, an open source 3D space simulator.

The box booted back up just fine, not even a delay for a disk check.
I just ran XBench as sort of a torture test, no problems, overall score = 146.90.

Anybody else want to try celestia and see what happens? I ran it from inside the disk image if that makes any difference.

Thud said:

Anybody else want to try celestia and see what happens? I ran it from inside the disk image if that makes any difference.

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I downloaded it, and while I haven't had a chance to really play around with it (it appears to be pretty complex), it launches and runs just fine. In fact, it's running in the background as I'm typing this.

I did too, it runs fine. nice app.

Same thing on my Mini, locked it up good. I copied to the aps folder first though. Looks like it doesn't like the Mini for some reason. Probably the video drivers. Kinda have to expect that for new hardware.

Ran Xbench just for fun and only scored a 117.35. neye: Sure wish my memory would get here.

It must be something with the Video Chipset in the Mini. Tried it on mine and same lockup. Never had a total lockup under osx and I do so much with my computers. I tried it on my G4 Sawtooth and it worked fine. Same exact OS with same updates. Will have to check into it and see if anyone can figure out what exactly the program is doing.

it locked up on my MDD G4. same thing you mentioned. total lockup, cursor disappears. that sucks that it does that. oh well, doesn't matter to me much anyway. i have starry night backyard.

Wapa18 said:

it locked up on my MDD G4. same thing you mentioned. total lockup, cursor disappears. that sucks that it does that. oh well, doesn't matter to me much anyway. i have starry night backyard.

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Seems to run on Older G4's and lock on newer G4's. I wonder what it does not like? Still seems like some video issue.

Wapa18 said:

it locked up on my MDD G4. same thing you mentioned. total lockup, cursor disappears. that sucks that it does that. oh well, doesn't matter to me much anyway. i have starry night backyard.

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My cursor was still active, but that was the only thing. Clock stopped ticking, and nothing would focus when the cursor was on it and the mouse clicked. Odd, huh?

dtravis7 said:

Seems to run on Older G4's and lock on newer G4's. I wonder what it does not like? Still seems like some video issue.

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Probably doesn't like ATI graphics cards.

I have the same problem on my PC games, when I switched from my Nvidia MX4 card to an ATI 9200 SE card some of my games just stopped working and entailed a trawl around the web looking for patches.

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses said:

Probably doesn't like ATI graphics cards.

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My iBook has an ATI chip set though, and it runs fine on my machine.

Amen-Moses said:

Probably doesn't like ATI graphics cards.

I have the same problem on my PC games, when I switched from my Nvidia MX4 card to an ATI 9200 SE card some of my games just stopped working and entailed a trawl around the web looking for patches.

Amen-Moses

Click to expand...

Well, I have an ATI X800 in my PC and the windows version of this program runs fine. I realize that the chipsets between the X800 and the 9200 in the Mini are quite a bit different, but the X800 was the first ATI card I've owned and I'm having pretty much zero problems with it. Was the 9200 particularly known for compatibility problems?

dan828 said:

Well, I have an ATI X800 in my PC and the windows version of this program runs fine. I realize that the chipsets between the X800 and the 9200 in the Mini are quite a bit different, but the X800 was the first ATI card I've owned and I'm having pretty much zero problems with it. Was the 9200 particularly known for compatibility problems?

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I have used ATI for years in my Pc's and now in my Macs and have never had any problems at all.

If you noticed most of the Mac users that reported it worked fine use older Macs. The only Non MINI user that reported a Lock here had a MDD which is very close in CPU to the Mini. So maybe it's the newer G4's that the program does not like. Just a thought.

Well I'm glad mine wasn't the only one. Definitely a problem with the mini, or at least new G4's with the radeon 9200 chipset.

The program just uses OpenGL though.. so it seems this would be a bug in the 9200's drivers.


*edit*
There are a few threads on this over on the celestia forums. Many G4 users are affected. It's a Radeon 9x00 driver issue that affects recent versions of OSX. There's a workaround posted in this thread... and it's also in the "Mac OSX" readme file included in the disk image, sorta buried down near the bottom. Basically you need to edit 1 line in the CFG file until Apple fixes the driver bug.

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6613

witeshark said:

Run repair permissions After every software update, and about every 2 weeks

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Whatever happened to "it just works?"

Its not apple its the 3rd party developer's making programs that crash it and put stuff in wrong places and ruin permissions!

ryanyogan said:

Its not apple its the 3rd party developer's making programs that crash it and put stuff in wrong places and ruin permissions!

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Yeah! Those idiots should have know Apple's drivers didn't fully implement openGL! Just stick with Apple programs and we won't have these problems, because Apple is perfect! :bomb: Who needs third party apps?

Now just repair your permissions, that'll fix it.

ryanyogan said:

Its not apple its the 3rd party developer's making programs that crash it and put stuff in wrong places and ruin permissions!

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OSX isn't supposed to let that happen... when a 3rd party program crashes, isn't the OS supposed to be able to recover gracefully? And because of the security that's inherent in OSX, why would any 3rd party application be allowed to "ruin permissions?" If that were the case, then that would indicate some SERIOUS security holes in OSX. It would be just as vulnerable to trojans as Windows is. However, that is NOT what is happening here.

(by the way, the fact that you have to "repair permissions" for so many issues leads me to question how secure/reliable OSX really is. )

This crash has been confirmed as a bug in the OSX video drivers for the ATI Radeon cards. It is not a bug in Celestia. OSX is barfing when celestia tries to use a certain OpenGL feature.
You have to disable the vertex shader feature in order for it to work.
One of the celestia developers has filed a bug report with Apple, and ATI says they are working with Apple on the issue.
I read this in the celestia forums.

Did you ever think that Maybe it's ATIs drivers fault? Read the PC sites like Anandtech and watch when a new ATI driver comes out with the the problems people have. ATI drivers are known to be buggy, and it's mentioned over and over on all the most respected PC sites. So this does not suprise me in the least. I have experienced it over and over with ATI drivers on XP and 2k.

Good post Thud! Thanks for letting us know how to keep Celestia working till Apple/ ATI resolves this.