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Re: Mathematica 7.01 and Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg103977] Re: [mg103928] Mathematica 7.01 and Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
• From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
• Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:56:38 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <200910131420.887186@jfultz2winlap>

On 14 Oct 2009, at 04:02, John Fultz wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:18:38 -0400 (EDT), Andrzej Kozlowski wrote:
>> I have been experiencing rare but very irritating problems running
>> Mathematica 7.01 under Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on a MacBook. What
>> happens is that for some reason the kernel suddenly quits during an
>> evaluation. When I try to restart it (by evaluating some  
>> expression) I
>> get the message: "The kernel failed to start because you attempted to
>> run more Mathematica kernels than you have licensed." There are two
>> buttons, Purchase and Cancel. I find it rather annoying that the
>> Purchase button is selected by default but not half as annoying as  
>> the
>> fact that clicking on either button produces no effect. Everything is
>> actually frozen and there is no way out other than force quitting
>> Mathematica.
>>
>> Has anyone experienced anything similar? As I mentioned - this seems
>> fairly rare; it has happened twice since I installed Snow Leopard
>> about  a month ago and I can't reproduce it.
>>
>> Andrzej Kozlowski
>
> We've been investigating this problem internally.  Our initial  
> investigation
> suggests that this happens only when a Java runtime launched by the  
> kernel has
> been left running (for reasons yet unknown), even though the kernel  
> died.  If
> you kill the Java runtime, then it'll free up the process.

Thanks a lot, that explains everything. Some people have written  
advising me to kill any additional Mathematica processes that were  
running but, of course, I already knew that though forgot to mention  
it in my post. There were no recognisable Mathematica processes (or  
anything beginning with Math) running. I normally use Apple's Activity  
Monitor to kill any processes that cause problems, and that was the  
first thing I looked at. This may be a bit naive question, but what it  
the Java runtime process name when it is launched by the Kernel?
Right now the only Java related process that I see in the Activity  
Monitor is something called JavaApplicationStub, actually two of them,  
but none of them seems to be it (as they do to quit when I quit  
Mathematica).

Andrzej Kozlowski

>
> The best way I know of to kill the process is the old-fashioned,  
> Unix-style
> method.  I.e., open up a Terminal session, use 'ps' to finds its  
> pid, and
> terminate it with 'kill -9'.
>
> We're working to resolve this and other Snow Leopard issues.  We've  
> been a bit
> slower on this then I would have liked...partly because of a  
> collision of
> internal resources, and partly because a couple of the Snow Leopard  
> issues have
> been difficult to reproduce and diagnose.  But I'm hoping to have  
> more to say on
> the issue in the near future.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Fultz
> jfultz at wolfram.com
> User Interface Group
> Wolfram Research, Inc.
>
>