Screensaver freezes my G5 with 10.3.5

My Aquarium screensaver was working fine until Apple released the 10.3.4 update. After I installed the update my Mac froze hard right after the screensaver starts up. The technical support at SereneScreen was of no help and so I waited it out until Apple released the 10.3.5 update. I installed that and it looked better... for a few moments. Like 30 seconds into the screensaver my G5 freezes again. I always have to powercycle it to get it back. Again, SereneScreen just refered me to this forum to get other user's feedback.

Is there anybody else who has this problem? Or am I the only one?

[feldon34]

Are you running the latest version of the Aquarium from SereneScreen.com?

Yes, I do. Aquarium is 2.0.6 and Aquarium Time is 1.1.6.

[AKcrab]

No problems here with 10.3.5 and MA 2.0.6.
Did you look at the console log or system log for events leading up to the freeze?
Other screen savers run fine?

Have you had any freezing problems with any other screen saver?

I have a G5 which does freeze up on occasion. It did it before I got the "fish" saver.

And, it only freezes up during a screen saver...interesting. With that said, I have had the G5 for around 5 months now and it has frozen up about four times. But, only when a screen saver is being run, never when the machine is in use.

By the way, Apple says that isn't happening! I beg to differ.

[JimO'Connor]

Hi all,

My 2x2Gig G5 is running 10.3.5 and isn't having any freezing problems with Goldfish or Marine Aquarium. I'm interested in any information you can give to help us find this (which is why Tech Support wasn't any help, we have no leads on what you are seeing and we don't get these reports often so we can't find a common thread). Generally speaking, we can't crash the system. We can crash the screen saver application, which causes the normal desktop to reappear (fixed one of these in Goldfish a couple days ago), but it _SHOULD_ be impossible for us to hang the system.

If you have any hints to how this is happening then please let us know.


Thanks,
Jim O'Connor

Thanks for all the replies.

No, I have no problems at all with other screensavers. Since the box freezes hard there are no entries in any log files. There is no crash log.

It is a little curious because if I press the Test button the screensaver works just fine. Only when I actually trigger it as a screensaver it freezes up my system. The upgrade to 10.3.5 improved things a little in a way that a) the freeze comes a little later, and b) the screensaver actually displays the beach ball after the crash, i.e. I can probably log in remotely and kill the process. Something I haven't tried, yet.

I am aware that this is nothing that can be resolved remotely. Could somebody give me pointers to how I could troubleshoot it? I am thinking of tracing system calls of the screensaver process and see at what point it hangs and such.

[Michael Babin]

Could you describe the sequence of events and the resulting state of the machine in a bit more detail? For example, when the screensaver activates, the screen(s) fade to black (do you have one monitor or multiple monitors?), then the aquarium appears. Do you see the fade to black? Does the aquarium appear? Does it start animating? Is sound on or off? If it's on, do you hear it? When it freezes, what (if anything) is on the screen(s)?

Do you encounter the same problem when you run the application? Have you tried running the application in full-screen mode? Any problems when doing so?

You said the screensaver works fine when you use the Test button in System Preferences. Do you have a hot corner defined to activate the screensaver? If so, what happens when you activate it using the hot corner?

When is the screensaver set to activate? What are your sleep settings in the Energy Saver prefs panel?

[Steve Pendleton]

Same problem here since I migrated to a new DP 1.8 G5, OSX 10.3.5, ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128MB, 20" Cinema Display. Prior to this I was running 10.3.5 on a DP 533 G4 without a problem of any kind. I upgraded on Wednesday this week and have had at least one freeze a day, at first I thought it was a hardware issue because when I woke the system from sleep the monitor stayed dark. When the same thing happened again I started looking for answers, I had used Apple's new system migration tool when setting up my new machine and there were only 2 apps that needed any kind of attention to get them working correctly, one was Virex and the other was this screensaver which required me to enter my serial number before it would work. I also remembered changing a couple of settings in the screensaver prefs whilst checking the new system over. Apart from it now using an extra fish on a widescreen display I had also set the bottom left hot corner to start the screensaver. All other settings are as I have always used without any issues. After the last freeze yesterday evening I tried to disable the hot corner setting, I opened system prefs, clicked on desktop and screensaver, then on the screensaver tab and got an instant system wide freeze. I could see the Mac Aquarium preview but only the power key would shut down my machine. I rebooted and removed the MA screensaver from my User/Library/Screensavers folder. All other screensavers appeared okay so I turned off the hot corner activation and checked for an updated version of the app only to find that the version I am running, 2.0.6 is the latest. Then I checked here to see if there were any reports of something similar and found this thread. Obviously I don't like intentionally causing system crashes but I do want to get the screensaver running again so will check out some of the questions you guys have asked of the first person. However what I have done is to move the screensaver app into the Library/Screensavers folder, so far I have not had a problem, I have the screensaver set to 5 minutes, Energy Saver set to sleep screen at 15 minutes and system sleep at 30 minutes. So far everything is working normally. I regularly rebuild disk permissions, run fsck and Diswarrior on my hard drives so don't think there are any problems like that. I will report anything else here, in the meantime please ask if there is anything specific you would like an answer to or get me to check out for you.

[JimO'Connor]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your detailed description of what you did and what happened.

Re-entering the keycode is a standard thing when you move from one machine to another because the way the keycode is stored is specific to the machine you are on. This is a form of copy protection to keep people from posting the file their keycode is in on the internet. While having to re-enter the keycode is a pain, but it isn't an indication of anything being wrong.

What is the "Screen Saver app"? Do you mean "Marine Aquarium.app"? That is an interesting thing to try, if so. Please let us know if this solution continues to work for you as it may be a clue to what is going on, or an interesting coincidence.

Also, could you please check the ownership of the screen saver? Since you did a migration it is possible that there is a problem there. If you are familiar with the terminal a long listing (ls -alR /Library/Screen\ Savers/) could prove interesting.

Since we have a couple people with a persistent problem, it is likely something specific to your machines' hard drive that is the problem. That makes it hard to repro (I do the same system update as everyone else, so far without incident).

If you have a spare hard drive laying around, it would be interesting to see if a fresh install of the OS with all of the system updates run on it, THEN adding Marine Aquarium still causes you crashes...

Again, thanks for your detailed description. It may give us some clues as to what is going on.

[Steve Pendleton]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes I did mean "Marine Aquarium 2.0.saver" when I said Screensaver app sorry for any confusion! So far I have had no problems after installing it to the new location and disabling the hot corner to start the screen saver.

I have checked ownership and permissions through terminal as you asked and have attached the results as a text file, hope this is of some use to you.

I don't have a spare hard drive for the G5 but I could try installing it on my 12" G4 Powerbook which is also at 10.3.5 if that is of any use but I suspect not as I didn't have any problems on my old G4 desktop machine.

I will try testing various start times for both screensaver and energy saver and let the G5 put itself to sleep through them to see if that causes any problems when waking.

I'll let you know how things go.

Steve

[JimO'Connor]

Just as an aside: It would be a very bad idea to have ANY screen saver in both /Library/Screen Savers and ~/Library/Screen Savers/ because of the way the dynamic linking works in Cocoa. You can get all sorts of crashes (though none of them should lock up the machine) that way because the linker will find classes with the same names in multiple places.

Hot corners SHOULD be safe since that is just an alternate way to kick off the screen saver module, so you might try turning that back on.

Your listing looks okay to me. Nothing throws up any red flags.

We'll keep this in our bag of tricks to see how many people it solves problems for.

Thanks Steve.

[Steve Pendleton]

Jim,
I'm now pretty sure that the screensaver is not the cause of my problems.

I got more freezes last night whilst playing DVD's so I decided to do a clean install back to 10.3.4.

Whist checking all my apps launched okay under 10.3.4 I launched Marine Aquarium.app in a window. I hit the F key to enter fullscreen mode but when I hit it again to exit it reverted to a window and then my machine froze. The cursor still moved then it changed to a spinning cursor before changing back to a pointer again. The bubble sound had also stopped but it started again for about 3 seconds before stopping again. Only a forced restart got me out of the situation.

As I was running repairs etc on the hard drive I realised that all but one of the freezes have been when the apps have been displaying images in fullscreen mode, I now believe that this is where the problem lies so I am being extra careful not to run anything fullscreen until I track down a solution.

Checking on various sites such as MacFixit shows that plenty more are experiencing similar problems.

Thanks for your input, hopefully it won't be too long before I can run Marine Aquarium again with any confidence!

Steve

[johnblommers]

Originally posted by JimO'Connor
Just as an aside: It would be a very bad idea to have ANY screen saver in both /Library/Screen Savers and ~/Library/Screen Savers/ because of the way the dynamic linking works in Cocoa. You can get all sorts of crashes (though none of them should lock up the machine) that way because the linker will find classes with the same names in multiple places.

Hot corners SHOULD be safe since that is just an alternate way to kick off the screen saver module, so you might try turning that back on.

Your listing looks okay to me. Nothing throws up any red flags.

We'll keep this in our bag of tricks to see how many people it solves problems for.

Thanks Steve.

So I looked in /Library/Screen Savers and sure enough there is Goldfish Aquarium.saver although it's a faceless icon. Why is there no Marine Aquarium in there? Well, it's in /users/johnb/Library/Screen Savers instead. Now I have occasionally had MA freeze my system hard, usually overnight, while GA has never managed this feat.

Emboldened by the news, I am moving MA to /Library/Screen Savers!

[AKcrab]

And just to elaborate for those who may be confused...

/Library/Screen Savers == Available to all users
~/Library/Screen Savers == Available to a single user

[johnblommers]

Originally posted by AKcrab
And just to elaborate for those who may be confused...

/Library/Screen Savers == Available to all users
~/Library/Screen Savers == Available to a single user

Whenever I am clear headed and enjoy presence of mind, I always install a screen saver in ~/Library/Screen Savers. That lets me troubleshoot problems by switching users.

My last post hinted that I had not installed the GA screen saver according to my guiding principles. So I went back to the Beta installer and re-installed GA.

AHA! Neo was right! The installer does not give me the option to "install only for this user." And its icon is still faceless.

Feature enhancement request
Please allow the user to install GoldFish Aquarium in their home directory. Thank you!

As a work-around, the user can drag the screen saver to the desired location. But this is not a documented procedure and I am not going to try this with Beta version software

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by johnblommers
As a work-around, the user can drag the screen saver to the desired location. But this is not a documented procedure and I am not going to try this with Beta version software

It works fine.

In theory, OS X should handle in the screensaver install location all by itself.. Drag a .saver (not goldfish) to the desktop and double click it...

The problem is that goldfish also must install some files in /Library/Application Support/

[JimO'Connor]

The Apple installer has its advantages and its disadvantages. I'll probably write a new installer exactly because you can't select a /Library or a ~/Library install, and it will probably include an uninstall because there are 3 things installed and 3 files created by running.

I dont have aqarium, normally I use a Mac, but right now when reading this I am on a PC. (I found news about GoldFish Aq in Versiontracker). I have once had a similar problem and my solution was to repair the ColorSync profiles (->applications>utilities>ColorSync)

[JimO'Connor]

Interesting. We'll see how many people this helps.

Thanks!