Mosaic Run-Time Problems

1. Mosaic dumps core

Most likely, this is because your system is slightly misconfigured. Try starting Mosaic back up with with the following command-line flag: Mosaic-sun -ghbnie If Mosaic works with the -ghbnie flag, then your system is coredumping while trying to discover its own fully qualified hostname with the gethostbyname() system call; contact your system or network administrator.

If Mosaic still doesn't work, follow the instructions displayed as Mosaic dumps core and send a bug report to mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

2. An error message shows up in the Mosaic window saying that Mosaic couldn't retrieve a file over the network

There are three possible explanations: (1) You aren't connected to the Internet. (2) You are behind a firewall. (3) Your system can't resolve the remote machine name "www.ncsa.uiuc.edu" (There is the additional possibility that the central NCSA document server might be temporarily down, in which case you should try running Mosaic again in a few minutes.)

If the problem is (1) or (2), your network administrator will have to find some way to fix it.

If the problem is (3), and you're running on a Sun, try the binary named Mosaic-sun-lresolv. If this still doesn't work, or if you're not on a Sun, then contact your network administrator.

3. You see lots of warning messages in the terminal window.

If you get warning messages (generally about missing "keysyms" or fonts) but the Mosaic window comes up and stays up, then the situation isn't serious and Mosaic will run normally. Read the online Frequently Asked Questions for more information on how to make the warning messages stop showing up.

Some X servers refuse to run Mosaic when all of the fonts Mosaic requests upon startup are missing. If this happens to you, your X server is either misconfigured or broken. You should probably contact your system vendor. (As a last resort, grab a copy of the Mosaic app-defaults template file and substitute fixed for all the fonts, and try to run with that.)