Bad news: Photolier & Intel Mac's

[PaulN]

Hi folks,
I just tried running Epson Photolier on one of the new Intel based iMacs, and it won't convert an ERF file. It processes the file, but once it hits about 90%, it bombs out with an error saying "Not enough free space on the disk." The disk that I'm having it save the one .ERF file has 30gb free, and I've tried my home directory, which has 130gb free. It is an odd error message to say the least.
If I have some time tonight, I'll see if I can run the program through a debugger to find out if there is a temp file it is trying to write in an odd directory. I doubt it though.

I'm using a fresh out of the box intel iMac, with a freshly downloaded version of Photolier. I haven't installed Photoshop yet, so I don't know if the plugin will work.

Anyone have a contact at Epson? I'd love it if they were to release a Universal Binary version of Epson Photolier.

 

[MP Guy]

sounds like low swap space or a lack of dedicted swap.

 

[PaulN]

sounds like low swap space or a lack of dedicted swap.

The root partition has 130gb+ free. The default OSX swap configuration is to use a swap file, not a swap partition. Good thought though.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 244781464 102187228 142338236 42% /

I never had this problem on my previous iMac, with less then 1gb free on the root partition. Both systems are running 10.4.4, both of them stock build/installation of OSX. The only difference with the intel iMac is that it has way more hard drive space and is running on a different architecture. The G4 has 768mb or ram, and the x86 only has 512mb. That should be plenty for converting a 6mb RAW file. It'll be bumped up to 1.5gb of RAM on monday, but still, that shouldn't affect Photolier.

 

[MP Guy]

try

swap -l

to list your swap space

 

[PaulN]

try

swap -l

to list your swap space

On OSX? I couldn't find 'swap' utilizing the find command. On OSX the swapfiles live in /private/var/vm:

-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 Jan 20 19:45 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 Jan 20 20:52 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 134217728 Jan 20 12:56 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 Jan 20 13:00 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 536870912 Jan 20 13:03 swapfile4

Provided you have room on the root partition, your swapfiles can grow accordingly.

While OSX is FreeBSD based, they've changed some things, and the old swap commands no longer exist. If you can give man explicit path to 'swap' I'll check for it, but my system wide search turned up nothing, neither did 'man -k' for swap. I also have the developer tools installed, and there wasn't anything in there either.

 

[sevres_babylone]

Somewhat related, you might want to read this post at photoshopnews.com concerning Photoshop performance on the intel macs:

http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/20/editorial-should-the-macbook-pro-have-waited-for-photoshop/

Generally for issues involving Rosetta and all things Mac, I recommend:
http://www.macintouch.com

The Photolier news is a downer. Even though I'm not likely to upgrade my Mac till 2007, unless there are signs of a commitment by Epson towards the R-D1 concept, I don't hold out much hope for Epson to do the programming work.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I've never used MacOS X, but have you tried using df -k ? It should give you the space of every mount, including your swap space.

I knew stepping into the wIntel world was a rather kooky idea.

 

[PaulN]

I've never used MacOS X, but have you tried using df -k ? It should give you the space of every mount, including your swap space.

I knew stepping into the wIntel world was a rather kooky idea.

Yup; see above I have 130gb+ on the partitions that hold the swap files.

It's not linux or BSD, swapfiles are stored on the root partition in /private/var/vm. They grow dynamically as you run out of physical memory. Once that happens, the memory is swapped to disk. Instead of allocating hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of disk space like on *BSD or Linux, you don't have to on the Mac. Once you get below a certain threshold though, the OS warns you. If you don't have enough room for the files to grow, and you run out of physical memory, your hosed. However, unlike the other OSes, you don't have to loose space for swap that you may never even use.

OS X isn't BSD, and it's not Linux, but I like it. I can enable AES encrypted swapfiles with a single click. It's not as easy on other OSes. I know, I've tried.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

oh, duh. Now I know it's past my bedtime. Even my gf just said that my accent is beginning to slip; that's a serious sign of memory leaks. Was just waiting for her to finish her papers.

 

[jlw]

Hi folks,
I just tried running Epson Photolier on one of the new Intel based iMacs, and it won't convert an ERF file.

I don't have an Intel-based Mac yet, so I can't do any experimenting to help you, but obviously this is a bogus error message, since you've got plenty of disk space. A wild guess would be that the application wants to address the disk in a way that bypassed Apple's programming standards, and the error message is a result when it finds it can't write. Developers often try this and it seems to work fine at first... until the architecture changes and their shortcuts don't work anymore.

One thing that's a long shot, but might be worth a try, would be to click the checkbox in Get Info that forces the application to run in Rosetta, the PowerPC code emulation environment. Lots of people have been reporting problems involving applications that, for some reason, call a mix of Intel code (possibly such as system-level drivers) and PowerPC code (the application itself); clicking the checkbox forces the whole thing to run as PowerPC-only. Can't imagine why Photolier would be calling the Intel side, but you never know at the system level...

 

[PaulN]

I don't have an Intel-based Mac yet, so I can't do any experimenting to help you, but obviously this is a bogus error message, since you've got plenty of disk space. A wild guess would be that the application wants to address the disk in a way that bypassed Apple's programming standards, and the error message is a result when it finds it can't write. Developers often try this and it seems to work fine at first... until the architecture changes and their shortcuts don't work anymore.

One thing that's a long shot, but might be worth a try, would be to click the checkbox in Get Info that forces the application to run in Rosetta, the PowerPC code emulation environment.

Good idea. I had hopes, but just read that the 'Open using Rosetta' check box only appears on universal binaries. It is a means to force Rosetta for applications that have problems with their x86 binary.

I'm hoping I can find an equivelent to 'truss' & 'sotruss' (from Solaris) on the mac to see if I can find out why it is kicking back that error.

Given that x86 is little-endian, and PPC is big-endian, I think that it may be doing some bitwise math and getting a result that it didn't expect. I would have thought that Rosetta would have caught that though.

 

[jlw]

Right, good catch about the force-Rosetta option being available only for universal binaries -- had forgotten about that point.

Anyway, now you know the meaning of the old saying, "The pioneers are the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs"! This is why I'm sticking with my G5 until such issues are sorted.

Unfortunately, it took such a long time to get Epson to offer Photolier for Mac at all that I wonder if they'll bother to rework it for universal binary.

 

[PaulN]

Right, good catch about the force-Rosetta option being available only for universal binaries -- had forgotten about that point.

Anyway, now you know the meaning of the old saying, "The pioneers are the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs"! This is why I'm sticking with my G5 until such issues are sorted.

Unfortunately, it took such a long time to get Epson to offer Photolier for Mac at all that I wonder if they'll bother to rework it for universal binary.

Sean Reid - If you are reading this thread, any chance that you can point it out to your contacts at Epson? I have a feeling that if I submit this to their helpdesk, it will be lost in the shuffle.

Given the relatively low number of cameras sold, I'm worried that the support for the ERF file will end here. I'm also curious to know if Vista will present any problems for the window's version of Photolier. At the very least, we can always convert it to DNG.

Better yet, if Epson ever decides to end-of-life this product, perhaps they could be lobbied to open up the source to their converter. I would *gladly* port the app over to a universal binary if I had the source. I'm sure there are a lot of others out there who would do the same thing.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I had hopes, but just read that the 'Open using Rosetta' check box only appears on universal binaries.

My God, what has Apple done?? Created a MacBabel. What happened to KISS? Oy.

 

[sfb_dot_com]

My word!

I never knew there were so many computer geeks out there masquerading as rangerfinder user luddites LOL. Takes me back to my days of running a software company back in the early 90's and late 80's. Sorry no accummulated wisdom to add to this debate because that was all a long time ago. I am expressing surprise at the haste in which Apple have rushed these products to market. It would appear that in real-world situations there is no discernable speed increase, except for Apple's very own code. I'd be interested to know if Aperture has this benefit, because it has otherwise been lambasted by the press for it's slow RAW processing. Also does Adobe's Currently-in-Beta LightRoom have the optimised for Intel code? Thinking further, that might explain why there has not yet been a version of Elements for the Mac, maybe Adobe got caught on the hop by Apple's decision to press ahead with Intel Macs?

Andy

 

[kepstein]

One thing that's a long shot, but might be worth a try, would be to click the checkbox in Get Info that forces the application to run in Rosetta, the PowerPC code emulation environment. Lots of people have been reporting problems involving applications that, for some reason, call a mix of Intel code (possibly such as system-level drivers) and PowerPC code (the application itself); clicking the checkbox forces the whole thing to run as PowerPC-only. Can't imagine why Photolier would be calling the Intel side, but you never know at the system level...

This option is only for Universal applicationsl not available for Photolier.

I, too, can't run this on my Intel iMac. Does the Epson PS Plugin work?

Regards,
Ken

 

[PaulN]

This option is only for Universal applicationsl not available for Photolier.

I, too, can't run this on my Intel iMac. Does the Epson PS Plugin work?

Regards,
Ken

Ken,
Switch to Adobe Lightroom and don't look back. I'm loving it. I can edit ERF files at the speed of editing JPG's on my old G4/1.25ghz.

Seriously; since downloading Beta2 of lightroom (universal binary), I don't have any need for Photolier. The filters for B&W are nice, but I'm sure I can generate some presets to do the exact same thing. Also, the 'auto correction' in Lightroom takes out color casts with a simple click. It took me hours to get the same results out of Photolier/Photoshop.

 

[Stephanie Brim]

Yeah, sticking with my G4 here as well. I don't know if I'm going to get a new Mac for a while...I may just get an older Powerbook instead of going with the new one (school, don't you know). While a Macbook Pro would probably be a good idea in the future to stay on top of technology, I'd rather make sure that every single application I needed to run on the thing worked well.

 

[iUser]

This option is only for Universal applicationsl not available for Photolier.

I, too, can't run this on my Intel iMac. Does the Epson PS Plugin work?

Regards,
Ken

I've just tested the PS plugin, it works!

 

[sevres_babylone]

I hope that one of the benefits of Epson bringing out the R-D1s is that there will be continued development of the software, leading to Mactel compatibility down the road.