Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

 

Pick an apple! 
Become a TidBITS member!
 

 

TidBITS Watchlist
 
Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?

If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.

Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd

sudo rm /var/log/asl.db

sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.

Visit Discussion of syslogd problem at Smarticus

Share your own tip! | Search TipBITS

 

 

Published in TidBITS 3.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.

 

 
30 Apr 1990 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

Lasers in the Jungle...

by Adam C. Engst Send Email to Author

Send Article to a Friend

Apple's low-end printers have never been much to write home about, but that may change soon. MacWEEK quotes sources at Apple saying that the company plans to introduce two new laser printers, the Personal LaserWriter SC and the Personal LaserWriter NT by mid-summer. Officially, though, Apple isn't admitting anything. The new lasers are expected to provide an attractive alternative to the Hewlett Packard LaserJet IIP, which retails for $1495 but can be found for under $1000. The Personal LaserWriter SC should retail for around $2100 while the Personal LaserWriter NT will cost about $3300.

It would seem that the LaserJet IIP is significantly cheaper than the Personal LaserWriter NT, but adding PostScript and its required extra memory as well as an AppleTalk port to the IIP raises its price significantly. In addition, HP has yet to ship its recently-announced PostScript cartridge. Not to be outdone by HP, Apple will include LaserJet emulation in the Personal LaserWriter NT.

The Personal LaserWriter SC will replace the current LaserWriter II SC, but will suffer from the same problems in printing. To obtain non-jaggy text from the LaserWriter II SC (and the new Personal LaserWriter SC), users must either use a font scaling utility like Adobe's ATM or QMS's Font Freedom or put up with storing fonts four times larger than those printed out. Of course, System 7.0's TrueType should also help, but the realistic release date has slipped to late 1990.

Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 01-May-90, Vol. 4, #17, pg. 1
MacWEEK -- 26-Jun-90, Vol. 4, #24, pg. 1
MacWEEK -- 10-Jul-90, Vol. 4, #25, pg. 1
InfoWorld -- 02-Jul-90, Vol. 12 #27, pg. 5
MacWEEK -- 31-Jul-90, Vol. 4, #26, pg. 4

 

BBEdit 10 from Bare Bones Software — All the editing power you
need, with more than one hundred new features! The leading
professional HTML and text editor for the Mac keeps getting better!
Download the demo and see for yourself! <http://barebones.com/>