MacOS X hanging bug!

[lpetrich]

I'm at the latest version of OSX, 10.4.7 and I'm using an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video card.

I recently downloaded Celestia 1.4.1 and tried to run it on my PowerMac G4. Twice when I ran it, the GUI froze and the system stopped accepting input.

Celestia would make its splash screen, then its display window and menubar. It would then produce some nonsense graphics in that window, then hang the system.

I did not get a Pasted Screen of Death, as I like to call it, when the display gets a massage on it saying that you need to restart yoru computer.

I also checked the file panic.log, which keeps track of kernel crashes, and it contained nothing that relates to these recent crashes.

Has anyone else encountered that sort of serious misbehavior? Is there any stopgap fix like deleting configuration files? Or would I have to wait for Celestia 1.4.2?

[selden]

Have you tried modifying celestia.cfg as described in the "preliminary user's faq" that's at the top of the Celestia Users Forum?

Specifically, remove the # that's at the beginning of the line

Code: Select all

# IgnoreGLExtensions [ "GL_ARB_vertex_program" ]


At any rate, there would seem to be something wrong in Apple's ATI graphic drivers for the Radeon 9000. You'll need to report it to Apple. This is not something that is likely to be worked-around in any version of Celestia. Sorry.

[dirkpitt]

Thanks for the report. Actually Celestia for OS X is supposed to automatically suggest installing the fix selden is describing.
I'll take a look.

FWIW, it's unlikely that ATI will offer a permanent fix for their ATI 9000/9200 driver crashing bug. Plenty people have already
filed bug reports. Promises have been made, but with no results. If you have a tower, I would strongly recommend upgrading your video card.