Sonoma 14.4 Aerial will not run

[Mac0User]

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• Mac model: Studio
• macOS version: 14.2
• Monitor setup: 2 5K Apple/LG

[Mac0User]

done

[glouel]

@Mac0User I'm going to need more details, about you downloaded, and what part doesn't work ? Did you download Aerial Companion and that doesn't work, did you install via homebrew ? etc etc

Also I assume this is Sonoma 14.2 and not 14.4 ?

[jeffday]

piggybacking off this as i imagine it's probably the same issue - aerials also does not work for me in sonoma.

model: MacBook Pro 14" 11/2023
os version: Sonoma 14.2.1
monitors: DELL S2722QC and DELL U2722DE

the behavior i'm seeing is that i can edit settings via the companion just fine, but trying to edit them by clicking the "options" button under the screensaver pane of the system preferences does not work - clicking the button does nothing. also, the preview for the screensaver just shows a black screen.

[glouel]

the behavior i'm seeing is that i can edit settings via the companion just fine, but trying to edit them by clicking the "options" button under the screensaver pane of the system preferences does not work - clicking the button does nothing. also, the preview for the screensaver just shows a black screen.

Is it just editing settings and the preview that doesn't work, or does the screensaver doesn't work when your mac goes to sleep ?

As for the settings things, try this :

• Close system settings (the entire window)
• Open Activity Monitor
• Look for things called "legacyScreenSaver" (there might be a couple)
• Kill them

Things should work after that. Sometimes some parts of the legacy thing of macOS crash for some reason, this usually fixes it.

[jeffday]

Is it just editing settings and the preview that doesn't work, or does the screensaver doesn't work when your mac goes to sleep ?

all of the above

I don't see anything matching legacyScreenSaver in the process list if I have activity monitor open when messing around with the screen saver settings

[glouel]

Can you make a screenshot of this ?

As I said, you should close System Settings to make sure it can get unstuck. Then launch it again.

[jeffday]

yeah, I did close and reopen system settings.

[glouel]

Ok thanks. Looks like nothing starts here, not even the mini preview.

One thing I could suggest is restarting your mac, it has been known to fix cases like this. Sometimes macOS prevents it to launch for some unknown reason and it's fine next boot.

If that doesn't work, I would suggest :

• Close System Settings
• opening Console.app, then filter for errors
• open system settings again to that panel

And see if you see any error here (probably a launch denied for unknown reason, which is what usually gets fixed by a reboot).

[jeffday]

ah, figured it out. filesystem permissions error - was trying to have aerials play a bunch of deep sea videos i'd synced locally using google drive, however it was blowing up due to a lack of read permissions for those directories within the legacyScreenSaver process.

[glouel]

Ha, interesting. I'm surprised you couldn't get options working because of that though, although it's usually a pretty bad issue. But yeah legacyScreenSaver is becoming fairly hostile to "simple" things like that.

Try to put your videos in /Users/Shared/ instead, this is safe (for now at least).

[glouel]

Also, this is still something I'm not sure about, but try adding your video folder from within System Settings and not from Companion. I think that can lead to issues too.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to troubleshoot it, take care!

[jeffday]

digging into this a bit more i think the root issue is that the desktop client for google drive uses FileProvider and under the hood the directories it manipulates live within /Users/youruseraccount/Library/CloudStorage etc etc so by default only my user account has read/write on that

appreciate you walking me through how to troubleshoot this! apologies for hijacking this issue, as its probably a completely separate problem to what the OP was experiencing.

[glouel]

No worries, try adding that directory from System Settings just in case, see if that fixes it, but it's very likely that anything in your user account will get denied by the various new security restrictions that Apple has put on us, on top of the whole FileProvider API thing.

Truly local files will be safer (an external drive works too, for now).