Thoth Under Tiger?

[Makosuke]

Anyone else here using the venerable old Thoth under Tiger? If so, how is it running for you, and are you, perchance, having any overall system stability problems?

I ask this because I'm one of the folks still clinging to the tragically dead but still best darned binary-leaning newsreader on OSX (I love my MAME ROMs and Japanese TV). Tried Unison, but still not quite where I wish it was, and Hogwasher looked unappealing.

So far, the only definite problem is that all downloads show up as cps or lines instead of kbps/kb--a minor annoyance, but not deal-breaker--and the preference panels have a tendency to not save your settings if you're not careful. Other than that, it seems to be running fine.

Except for the fact that my totally clean Tiger install has been remarkably unstable, and I'm pretty sure Thoth has been running every time I've had system freeze. I'd been running the 5 days since 10.4.1 was released without issue, then I started up Thoth last night and a couple hours later I had the "creeping beachball of doom" effect where eventually every program stalls on a beachball and even the force quit panel won't show up.

The logs show absolutely nothing in the five minutes before the freeze, but I'm still suspicious of Thoth. The other possible culprits are OT7 (possible), VLC (possible), Camino (doubt it), the ATI Displays additions (that goes next), and the Logitech Contol Center (hope that doesn't have to go), all latest versions.

Thoth users unite!

 

[taeclee99]

I am running thoth 1.7.1 under tiger 10.4.1. i have had absolutely no problems running thoth after I upgraded from Panther. What version of thoth are you running?

 

[alex_ant]

It should theoretically not be possible for Thoth or any other software without administrative privileges to cause any kind of system-wide problems like that. I would try disabling all nonessential software (everything you listed) for a while and see if the problems still persist, turning them back on one-by-one. But I doubt any of that software has anything to do with it. In my experience, the spinning beachball effect has been an occasional occurance in all versions of Mac OS X from the public beta through Panther (haven't used Tiger yet). There is apparently a bug in Loginwindow, or fix_prebinding, or something, that causes it?

 

[Makosuke]

I am running thoth 1.7.1 under tiger 10.4.1.

Say what?! I'm running 1.5.1, but I thought that was the last version before the app was killed. If that's not a typo and there is a later version, I don't suppose you could pass the disk image my way (or know of somewhere to get it), since I paid for it and I'd like to hold on to it as long as possible.

It should theoretically not be possible for Thoth or any other software without administrative privileges to cause any kind of system-wide problems like that.

Theoretically, no, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. So long as the program accesses something in the OS that has a bug in it, it can crash the OS. You can't exactly blame the app for this, but the functional fact remains that not using the app will not crash your system.

To give two examples, older versions of Azureus (a pure Java app without administrative access of any sort), were quite capable of exposing a bug in Apple's Java runtime that caused kernel panics. Likewise, there was an old app supplied by Apple designed to output a video stream to firewire that would bring the OS down on launch due, one assumes, to a bug in the OS.

Point being that, although Thoth wouldn't be my top suspect, it is at least one common thread in all the freezes I've had so far, and being a VERY old codebase it probably has a higher chance of accessing something oddball than most programs.

It could just as well be a different app, of course, or just a general OS bug (some others do seem to be having problems with Tiger freezing). Pretty sure it's not my hardware, anyway, as I had Panther running for weeks at a time stably using the exact same set of apps and useage patterns. Heck, I had panther up for 6 months straight on my work machine.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, I feel rather stupid now. I was using the ancient (even relative to the ancient final version) version 1.5.1, instead of 1.7.2, and that's why I was seeing CPS instead of KBps. I must've forgotten to keep the disk image of the version I was using, and so when I reinstalled everything from scratch on Tiger, I ended up assuming the 1.5.1 disk image I had was the latest one and installed that.

Managed to find somewhere that'd mirrored the 1.7.2 version ( http://www.pure-mac.com/~pristine/usenet.html ), so now I've got that. Hopefully it'll help (versiontracker reminded me that there were some significant architectural changes between 1.5 and 1.7, so there's a chance it might).

(Hey, come to think of it, the first OSX versions of Thoth sometimes tickled a bug that crashed dual processor Macs, so it's not out of the question.)