Re: [XonX-Users] xmaxima and Mac OS X/XonX

[Torrey T. L. <to...@mr...>]

At 9:51 AM -0700 4/11/02, Justin C. Walker wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Maxima is a public domain version of the old Macsyma symbolic math 
>package from MIT.  It's supported from sourceforge.  I have it 
>running, using clisp (also on sourceforge) on Mac OS X.
>
>I have an odd problem when running 'xmaxima', the X-based version. 
>It complains on startup that an expected executable is not present, 
>which is true.  After a bit, I get a second alert claiming timeout 
>waiting for that non-existent executable.  When I tell it to stop 
>waiting, it exits *along with* the whole desktop.  It appears that 
>the whole login environment is being blown away.  CrashReporter is 
>running, and I've enabled crash logs, but I don't get anything (core 
>dump or log) when this happens.
>
>Anyone know enough about XonX to know what could be happening, how 
>to track it down, or how to work around this?

I wish I could provide more than anecdotes, but I believe this is an 
example of XDarwin or xmaxima exploiting an underlying bug in Mac OS 
X. Two of my local users have reported the same experience with MS 
Word. (Ie. the entire desktop quits without warning and the users 
find themselves back at the login prompt.) Unfortunately, neither 
user was able to repeat this bug. If you've found a repeatable way to 
do this with XDarwin/xmaxima, we should be well on the way to finding 
a cure.

One suggestion on how to debug this would be to login remotely to the 
machine you are running XDarwin on. You can build XFree86 yourself 
and put host.def in xc/config/cf with the following line:

#define DefaultCDebugFlags              -g

This will cause XFree86 to be build debuggable and you can start 
XDarwin from your remote connection with:

gdb /Applications/XDarwin.app/Contents/MacOS/XDarwin

Hopefully when the Core Graphics window server bombs out XDarwin will 
crash but you will be able to make some sense of what XDarwin is 
doing with the debugger. Since XDarwin is running from a remote login 
context it shouldn't automatically quit when everything else does.

--Torrey