[P1] Disappeared Dock Icons

[Kim Gammelgaard]

If you are on a Pismo, your Harddisk may not be very large, and perhaps you
ran out of memory on the harddisk. Virtual Memory of OSX prior to 10.3 took
chunks 80 MB in size out of your harddisk, and it didn't update the figure
in the finder properly. The only way I know to make the finder give a fair
number is to delete something. I have roughly 1 GB left on my main partition
for swap space, and it is not a rare event that I almost run out of space. I
have 320 MB RAM for that matter. Copy and past the following lines in your
Terminal to see how much space the virtual memory uses and how much is left:

cd /var/vm
ls -l
df -k .

I get the following right now in Panther:

[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani% cd /var/vm
[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani% ls -l
total 524288
drwx--x--x  8 root  wheel        272 30 Oct 17:45 app_profile
-rw------T  1 root  wheel   67108864  8 Nov 14:02 swapfile0
-rw------T  1 root  wheel   67108864  8 Nov 15:05 swapfile1
-rw------T  1 root  wheel  134217728  8 Nov 16:02 swapfile2
[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani% df -k .
Filesystem   1K-blocks    Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9   4455292 3575252 835488    81%    /
[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani%

This means that I have used about 256 MB of Virtual memory ( The 524288 are
512 byte blocks, so you have to divide by two to get KB and divide by 1024
to get MB) and have 816 MB left on the partition. I try to follow those
numbers closely if I get strange error messages, as low memory situations
can make your Mac act up very strange indeed.

If you have panther use this instead:

cd /var/vm
ls -lh
df -h .


The h means: Human readable, and gives this answer instead:

[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani% ls -lh
total 524288
drwx--x--x  8 root  wheel       272B 30 Oct 17:45 app_profile
-rw------T  1 root  wheel        64M  8 Nov 14:02 swapfile0
-rw------T  1 root  wheel        64M  8 Nov 15:05 swapfile1
-rw------T  1 root  wheel       128M  8 Nov 16:02 swapfile2
df -kh .[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani% df -h .
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9   4.2G   3.4G   816M    81%    /
[Kims-iBook:/var/vm] kgani%

I think that is a cool new feature :-)

Cheers,

Kim

On 08/11/03 20:53, "Gary Adams" <gdadams1 at cox.net> wrote:

> This morning, I fired up the Pismo in 10.2.8 and the first thing I
> noticed was the dock icons were huge instead of small. I ended up
> restarting after Mail hung and then realized that only the OS X icons
> (Mail, iChat, etc.) were in the dock.
> 
> I booted from another drive and ran Disk Utility which found some
> allocation errors. Restarted. Still no other icons. Googled and found a
> suggestion to delete the Finder .plist in the terminal. That didn't fix
> it either. Found another suggestion to fix the permissions. Anybody
> have a clue?
> 
> (I've since added the icons again, but it was a pain.)
> 
> Gary