Kernel Panic

Another day, another error: I'm starting to think that my mac doesn't like Christmas. Maybe it is the Grinch of the Macs :-)

What to do when this kind of message appears on your screen?


Well, there isn't that much you can do, because the keyboard is locked and the mouse doesn't respond. All applications are frozen and there's no way of getting out of this situation elegantly.

All you can do is exactly as the text explains: "...Hold down the Power button for several seconds..." and the computer will turn off.

In my case, this message appeared when I pressed F12 to bring Dashboard to the front to check some widget. But unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what the problem was, as now the mac seems to be behaving well, as before.

Apple is not very helpful too

Later on, I learned that this message (referred to by Apple as a Kernel Panic) appears "when the core (kernel) of an operating system receives an instruction in an unexpected format, or that it fails to handle properly". Also, "a kernel panic may also follow when the operating system is not able to recover from a different type of error".

This kind of help from Apple is not very "helpful"! But I love their bottom line conclusion:

"A kernel panic can be caused by damaged or incompatible software or, more rarely, damaged or incompatible hardware"

So the problem is either related to software or hardware. Ok, it's good that we were able to rule out "little green men from another planet".

This is very frustrating, especially for a Mac newbie like me that is still learning how to deal with the Apple environment and philosophy. But the most frustrating of all is to fail to realize how a simple call to the Dashboard can cause this. So, I'm going to post here exactly what I was doing at that time to see if somebody can give me a hint on what might have caused this Kernel Panic:

I was editing a photo with Gimp to place in a Microsoft Word document. When I inserted the picture into the Word document, I wanted it to have a specific size. Since Word's "format picture" box only displays the sizes in inches and I only knew the size in centimeters, I needed to convert it to inches. That's when I pressed F12 to call Dashboard, which is where I have this converter tool widget that can provide me the necessary information about the picture size.

And the rest you already know :-(