How you can help us.

[Bernd]

To all beta testers on Mac OS 9:

If you have crashes with the beta version you could help us extremly finding the bugs by using MacsBug, the low level debugger from Apple. If you install this you will be able to send us very useful data. See the following instructions on how to use MacsBug.


Installation
============

MacsBug is available from

http://developer.apple.com/dev/tools/debuggers/MacsBug/

To install it, drag the file "MacsBug" into your System Folder and restart. The file must be loose in the System Folder, without any surrounding folder, and it must be at the top level, not in Extensions.

If it is correctly installed, the Mac's startup screen should say "Debugger installed".


When there's a crash
====================

There are two types of crashes; one is the "bomb alert", i.e. a message such as "The application 'Live' has unexpectedly quit because an error of type 2 occurred." With MacsBug installed, you will no longer get these types of error dialogs; you will drop into MacsBug instead.

The other one is when the system hangs. In this case you will have to drop into MacsBug manually. If it's a complete freeze (i.e. the mouse pointer doesn't move) then it's likely that you won't be able to drop into MacsBug; however, if the mouse still moves, try pressing command-power to get into MacsBug. If you have a new keyboard that doesn't have a power key, you will have to press the little interrupt knob at the computers case, if it has one. In the case of a G4, that's a very small knob below the reset button; it's too small to be pressed with a finger, you may have to use a pencil.


Generating logs
===============

Once you are in MacsBug, you want to generate a crash log that you can send to us. Please type the following four commands to do this:

stdlog
log stdlog1
frags -s "Live"
log

This will create two files on your desktop, named "StdLog" and "stdlog1". Please mail both files to us. You may want to move these files somewhere else (or delete them) after mailing them to us, because further invocations of those four commands will append to any existing files rather than replacing them.


Getting out of MacsBug
======================

After generating the crash logs, there are several ways to get out of MacsBug. Which one will work depends on where in the code the crash happened. You can try typing "es", which is supposed to quit Live; if it works, you have the chance to save any unsaved documents in other programs. It is strongly recommended that you restart your Mac afterwards, as you never know in what state the system was left after leaving MacsBug.

If "es" doesn't work, try "rs" instead. This immediately restarts the Mac from within MacsBug. Don't forget to check your hard disk with Disk 1st Aid afterwards.

Thanks a lot for helping us,

Bernd.