OS X Lion – The Cat Who Won’t Sleep
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
The OS Update is always fun, you look forward to all the new features that have been hyped up by the Developer, and when it you finally get your hands on that fresh piece of software you just can’t wait to install it. Well that is how I feel anyway, being that of the early adopter breed.
My most recent encounter was with Apple’s OS X Lion on my MacBook Pro. So far it has improved my productivity by giving me more gestures to easily switch between programs. It also gave me a better view for most apps with the ability to keep them in fullscreen mode, while still being able to switch between my apps. What it has also done is given me a few minor headaches after realizing some things weren’t quite right.
Being that I use my computer onstage in my band Ifdakar, I found that the driver for my pedal board was not compatible with Lion or it was overwritten during the update. Either way, after setting everything up for a gig I found this was the case. Something I should have checked out beforehand but as they say hindsight is 20-20.
The second was a bit more troublesome. I found when I closed the lid on my MacBook that it no longer went to sleep. The light didn’t start it’s “heartbeat” like normal and when I opened it up, the screen would flash what I was previously working on, then go black and then became unresponsive. I researched what could be causing this and tried many different solutions (like reseting the SMC and the PRAM) to no avail. Then I found what was causing the trouble with a few little terminal commands.
The first command
pmset -g
Gave me the following output:
Active Profiles:
Battery Power 1
AC Power 2*
Currently in use:
womp 1
halfdim 1
sms 1
panicrestart 157680000
gpuswitch 2
hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
networkoversleep 0
disksleep 10
sleep 0 (imposed by 42, 288)
hibernatemode 3
ttyskeepawake 1
displaysleep 10
acwake 0
lidwake 1
This let me see that “sleep” was being (imposed by 42, 288).
So then I put in the following command to see which process was 42.
ps -ef |grep -e 42
I found that Google Chrome was preventing my computer from sleeping.
Then I entered the same command again with the second number
ps -ef |grep -e 288
This time I found that my printer was also preventing my computer from sleeping.
So I uninstalled both my printer and Google Chrome to find out that was in fact the case. My computer slept just fine thus ending it’s insomnia. I went back and reinstalled Chrome and it seems to be fine now. Sometimes a clean install is all you need to fix a problem and yet again 42 was the answer to everything /geek joke.
