mbizer Posted November 8, 2007 Report Share Posted November 8, 2007 Hi, My wife and I are in different cities right now, but I still advised her to update to 6.1.138 not because she's running Leopard but because she's had problems with irregular launching that 6.1.138 is supposed to fix. In any case, she's running 10.4.9 PPC and I'm running 10.4.10 PPC, but we had very different install experiences. Mine went without a hitch, but hers didn't: she was asked to restart (I wasn't), and when she clicked "OK", she got the spinning system cursor and it was downhill from there. Eventually we had to force a shutdown. When she rebooted, I had her run application monitor and type "retr" in the search field. It showed both "RetroRun" and "RetroRunSL" -- but RetroRunSL is nowhere to be found among my running processes. How can this be? Should she have both RR and RRSL running? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted November 8, 2007 Report Share Posted November 8, 2007 Quote: we had very different install experiences. Mine went without a hitch, but hers didn't: she was asked to restart (I wasn't), The Retrospect installer routine will only prompt for a restart if the File System Plugin kext (kernel extension) was installed. It's possible that you did a custom install, or that you already had the file installed, so Retrospect didn't need to restart the OS. (personally I always do a custom install without the kext; I'm OK with not having members of a CD/DVD set mount on the Desktop) > It showed both "RetroRun" and "RetroRunSL" -- but RetroRunSL is nowhere to be found among > my running processes. RetroRunSL won't start at system start, since it's not in /Library/StartupItems/RetroRun (or anywhere else in the StartupIems folder). So it's likely that there were steps taken that have not been included in this report. She can kill the process if she wants to; it will restart if/when it's needed. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbizer Posted November 8, 2007 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2007 Quote: I always do a custom install without the kext; I'm OK with not having members of a CD/DVD set mount on the Desktop Do you do this because of the possibility of instability? Quote: RetroRunSL won't start at system start, since it's not in /Library/StartupItems/RetroRun (or anywhere else in the StartupIems folder). What would cause this to load, then? I had my wife restart her computer again, but both faceless background apps were loaded again, so I guess RetroRunSL was added to the login items! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted November 8, 2007 Report Share Posted November 8, 2007 Quote: I had my wife restart her computer again, but both faceless background apps were loaded again, so I guess RetroRunSL was added to the login items! Retrospect knows nothing about "login items" on Mac OS X. Those are user level, and Retrospect doesn't really care about users. Retrospect _will_ take advantage of the StartupItems folder, and will create /Library/StartupItems/RetroRun/ which, with the default configurations, will contain two items; retrorun and StartupParamaters.plist If you change Retrospect's preferences to not launch automatically, the RetroRun folder will remain, but it will be empty. No idea why you're seeing RetroRunSL after system restart. Note that these are not FBAs in the Classic Mac OS sense; they are true unix daemons. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbizer Posted November 9, 2007 Author Report Share Posted November 9, 2007 If an app is being relaunched automatically across restarts, it either must be in StartupItems or Login Items, no? (since this isn't a cron or launchd job) I still don't know what RetroRunSL is *for*. It definitely resides in the Retrospect application bundle. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted November 9, 2007 Report Share Posted November 9, 2007 Quote: If an app is being relaunched automatically across restarts, it either must be in StartupItems or Login Items, no? (since this isn't a cron or launchd job) No. You left out the possibility of it being launched indirectly by something that itself is launched as a startup item. Have you considered the possibility that your wife has something on like the backup server, or that she has a pending script that retrorun causes Retrospect to launch, launching RetroRunSL, or some such? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbizer Posted November 9, 2007 Author Report Share Posted November 9, 2007 Can anyone tell me what the function of RetroRunSL is? How is it different from RetroRun? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stewarsh Posted January 21, 2008 Report Share Posted January 21, 2008 RetroRunSL is launchd process. If you do a launchctl list, you'll see it there. However I don't where it is started from. There is not a definiton file in either /System/Library, /Library, or /etc/mach* I must say I hate when companies don't follow Apple's conventions for running this kind of stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jglenn Posted February 23, 2008 Report Share Posted February 23, 2008 I got rid of RetroRun from the /Library/Startupitems folder. Now when I reboot, RetroRunSL is launched automatically, and appears in Activity Monitor (all processes). CallMeDave said "If you change Retrospect's preferences to not launch automatically, the RetroRun folder will remain, but it will be empty. " Well, where is that preference? I turned off Notification->Automatically launch Retrospect and that didn't get rid of RetroRun or stop RetroRunSL from launching. I looked using Lingon for launchd listings for RetroRunSL, but I couldn't spot one. Maybe I didn't look in the right place? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted February 24, 2008 Report Share Posted February 24, 2008 Quote: I got rid of RetroRun from the /Library/Startupitems folder. Now when I reboot, RetroRunSL is launched automatically... Automatically? Apple has provided specific ways for items to be called on system start. Items in /Lilbrary/StartupItemsFolder/ will launch, with their appropriate permissions. Other items do not simply launch automatically. There's more you're not telling us (which is a known, as you have stated that you are seeing RetroRunSL via Activity Monitor, which means that you have logged in as a Finder user, which means that you have done more then just reboot, which leaves out discussion of the process that Apple has provided for items to launch on user login). Perhaps you can describe how your System Preferences are set for this user's Login Items? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kiil Posted April 21, 2008 Report Share Posted April 21, 2008 Navigate to Library/Preferences/ (not your Home/Library/Preferences). There you will find a file named com.apple.SystemLoginItems.plist. Open with a text editor to see the entries listed. If only RetroRunSL is listed, either delete the entire file or just delete the desired entr(y)(ies) from the file. Try a tool such as EasyFind (http://devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/) when spotlight seems to fail or is no help at all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted April 22, 2008 Report Share Posted April 22, 2008 Navigate to Library/Preferences/ (not your Home/Library/Preferences). There you will find a file named com.apple.SystemLoginItems.plist. Open with a text editor to see the entries listed. If only RetroRunSL is listed, either delete the entire file or just delete the desired entr(y)(ies) from the file. Retrospect itself does not write to that plist file; Retrospect has always depended on the shell script in /Library/StartupItems/ to fire up retrorun. In 2000, that was how Apple was telling developers to start unix background processes. If Apple currently has a more modern way that it's encouraging developers to use, Retrospect has not yet been updated to take advantage of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kiil Posted April 22, 2008 Report Share Posted April 22, 2008 This method is used by a few applications that normally launch on a per-user basis and desire access to the Window Server, but as the case may be with servers and workstations that run unattended, needs to launch before a user actually logs in. Hence it is found under Library/Preferences and not Home/Library/Preferences It is deprecated in Leopard, where you're supposed to use a LaunchAgent instead; but some older programs still use it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wylertay Posted April 29, 2008 Report Share Posted April 29, 2008 I encountered this same issue - OS X Server, 10.4.11. I thought I had killed and removed the RetroRun daemon, but RetroRunSL kept launching, and my machine mysteriously continuing to hang at odd times. I killed the daemon and deleted the com.apple.SystemLoginItems.plist file (which contained an entry for RetroRunSL). Unfortunately, I have to keep the Retrospect app itself installed as I still have to do restores from time to time from old backup sets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted April 30, 2008 Report Share Posted April 30, 2008 With what hardware (PPC or Intel)? I'm not seeing this on our Xserve G5 with MacOS Server. The Universal Binary version of 10.4.11 (distributed only with Intel Xserves, but possible to install on a PPC Xserve if you know what you are doing, and done by many to correct AFP issues) is a very different animal from the PPC-only 10.4.11 (both server and non-server). Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daigoro22 Posted October 26, 2008 Report Share Posted October 26, 2008 Navigate to Library/Preferences/ (not your Home/Library/Preferences). There you will find a file named com.apple.SystemLoginItems.plist. Open with a text editor to see the entries listed. If only RetroRunSL is listed, either delete the entire file or just delete the desired entr(y)(ies) from the file. Coming into this six months later.... Thanks so much for this tip! I had the same issue... I don't want a Retrospect runtime component in place when all I need Retrospect for is to restore from old backups. RetroRunSL was the only component in mine, so I deleted the whole file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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