[Indigo]<DMS>Laurel>6>Manual>laurel6-8.bravo!1

In Laurel, as in most interactive systems, lots of things can go wrong. Also as in most systems, some of them are your fault and some of them are not. Laurel tries to prevent you from wreaking destruction upon your environment, and reports any (perceived) violations in the feedback region.

The error reports in the feedback region are intended to be self-explanatory. If you cannot figure out what one means or what to do next, please send a message to LaurelSupport.PA (using Laurel if possible).

If Laurel detects certain internal error conditions, it interrupts whatever command was in progress and posts a message in the feedback region. In some cases, Laurel may decide that the error should be reported to LaurelSupport.PA, and, in such cases, it will prepare an error report form (after confirmation from you). This form contains internal status information of interest to the Laurel implementers and should be used whenever possible. If you confirm the use of this form, Laurel will restart itself and display the form in the composition region. You should then follow the instructions contained within the form, after which Laurel will again be available for normal use.

The vast majority of Laurel internal errors reported in the last year have turned out to be due to problems with the disk or with the Alto (Dolphin, Dorado) processor. If Laurel "freezes" or otherwise behaves peculiarly for no apparent reason, a simple check of your disk will probably fix the problem. Run the Scavenger.run program from the Alto Executive. If it reports a "Read error", then have a hardware maintainer check out your disks thoroughly. If Laurel continues to behave strangely, e.g., it doesn’t run at all, suspect the processor. If you have sent in an error report through the built-in error reporting mechanism, and you later discover that the problem really was due to faulty hardware, then please send a message to LaurelSupport.PA to explain what happened.

"Freezing" is defined as Laurel becoming completely unresponsive to mouse movement and keyboard input. If the cursor moves when the mouse is moved, then Laurel has not "frozen"; be patient and wait a bit longer for the current operation to complete. Only if an operation takes a very unreasonable amount of time should you suspect that Laurel is in a bad state. Use your good judgment; a long file transfer or a Quit or Mail file command given when the current mail file has over a hundred messages may take a while. If your cursor does not move when you move the mouse, but keyboard input is accepted by Laurel, then check to see whether your mouse is properly connected. (We get them all.)

Regardless of the above discussion, when Laurel enters automatic bug reporting mode, a real Laurel bug may be the culprit. Please do fill out the description part, and deliver the error report message. Only because of the diligent attention paid to these error reports by users in the past has Laurel has become as error free as it is.