Re: [gentoo-user] Re: my xorg-server 1.6 seems a bit unstable - what am I doing wrong?

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Denis wrote:
> Ordinarily, I would also point to I/O errors, but not this time.  I
> have had this same version of Mathematica, 5.2, for *years*, on this
> same machine, over several kernels and several Xorg upgrades, and it
> was rock-solid.  Not one X hang or crash.  Ever.  No error messages or
> I/O warnings ever.  The only thing I'd ever see in the console would
> be GTK+ errors from other programs.  Something about this latest X
> upgrade is making Mathematica unhappy, either because some previously
> supported format that worked fine with it has been altered or
> something else in that general regard.  This version being so outdated
> - that isn't a surprise.  It may not be a bug, so much as an
> incompatibility, perhaps
>
> I think the only thing I can do at this point that probably will fix
> this is to go to stable arch, but I am not willing to do that because
> I like my box the way it is now :-)  It's great and efficient for all
> other things.  Before I can get a local Mathematica upgrade, I will
> have to resort to using it via X forwarding off the central server.
>
>
>   

I forgot to mention this earlier.  The way I found out it was a I/O
error for me was this command.  hdparm -Tt /dev/hda && hdparm -Tt
/dev/hda .  I kept repeating that until it starting giving me errors. 
For mine it was after the third pass.  Something to keep in mind, it
could be something wrong with the driver in the kernel you are using. 
It could be any number of things like this.  It could be that it is a
mismatch as you mentioned between Mathematica and some other support
program such as gtk, python or any other number of things.

Me, I would hop on a mailing list for that software and ask them what
strace command you can run and then send them the results.  It may be
that they can make some sense of the error and recommend a fix or even a
downgrade of some other package. 

You may also want to use the q command to see what was upgraded since it
last worked.  That might point to something too.  I think it is the q
command that does that. 

Dale

:-)  :-)