A/UX on Mac : Need an overview

[Richard Todd]

Followups diverted to comp.unix.aux, since this is pretty Unix-specific stuff
here...

gee at client2.DRETOR.UUCP (Thomas Gee ) writes:
>As well, I run into continual problems with collisions between access
>permissions and Mac applications.  Many (most?) applications have *very bad*
>error recovery and announcement facilities.  
  Very true, but I'm not sure how much that's got to do with your problems 
here...

>                                            A case in point: MacWrite II.
>Like most Unix systems, I set the access permissions on "/" to 666 
>(thats "dr-xr-xr-x" for you beginners :-).  
I hope you actually set it to 755 or 755 (that's "drwxr-xr-x" or "dr-xr-xr-x");
setting it to 666 ("drw-rw-rw-") will cause all sorts of havoc for programs
that expect to be able to use paths starting from "/" (i.e. practically 
everything).  

>(thats "dr-xr-xr-x" for you beginners :-).  MacWrite II creates a temporary
>file under "/".  So, invoke MacWrite II and CRASH (panic: alloc: dup alloc).
>Lovely.  Very graceful.

  I *seriously* doubt that anything MacWrite II did caused that panic,
except insofar as MacWrite happened to find a part of your filesystem that
was corrupted.  That panic (meaning that the filesystem code tried to
allocate a block that was already allocated to some file) means that some
part of the filesystem structure on disk was seriously confused.  Be sure
to run fsck on that filesystem as soon as possible just to make sure
there's nothing still wrong with it.  As for running MacWrite II under A/UX,
I'm pretty sure a friend of mine has done it without problems (personally,I
use Epoch and TeX and avoid Mac word processors like the plague :-).  I'll
ask him next chance I get to see if there's anything special he had to do...

  While I'm here, I might as well comment on one way in which Unix-style 
permissions help MacOS a lot.  I'm sure all of you who use MacOS have 
experienced the dread disorder of Creeping System Corruption, where your
system starts to act more and more strangely until you surrender and re-install
the System.  Well, this happened to me under A/UX on the copy of the System
used to run MacOS programs under A/UX, so after re-installing the System file
from the distribution disks, I changed it to mode 444 (that's r--r--r--, 
i.e. read-only, for you beginners :-).  Funny, but I haven't had a case
of Creeping System Corruption since... 
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
"Try looking in the Yellow Pages under 'Psychotics'." -- Michael Santana