cut and paste failed

Minimum RAM for Leopard is 512MB RAM so you are well [within the requirements|http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs>. I can assure you that the amount of RAM in your computer is not the cause of your problem.

If its working then there has to be a problem in your system. The downside is that it would be very difficult to find and cure the problem.

Unless anyone out there has a better idea I would think the best way to go is an [Archive and Install|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1710].

You don't have to cut and paste, just make sure you type them the same as he did.

You can check to see if your tmp directory is missing by typing

ls /private/tmp/

in Terminal. That is el ess, not one ess. If it is missing, you will get a "No such file or directory" response. If it lists the contents, then it exists and his fix won't do anything. However, it could be a permission issue on that folder.

To run

sudo mkdir -p -m 01777 /private/tmp

you must be an Admin user. sudo is short for SuperUser Do. It will run the mkdir (make directory) command with superuser privileges. -p means make any intermediate directories (/private/) and -m means set the file permission mode to 01777. I couldn't quite narrow down the first two digits, but I assume that sets the UserID and GroupID to root:wheel, which it should be. 777 gives permission to the user,group, and others read,write,execute permissions.

Yes, those are the correct permissions.

Try running Activity Monitor (it's in the Utilities folder). Look and see if pboard is running under your user name. Also, open Console and see if there are any messages about launchd or pboard.

It appears that it is trying to make the tmp directory, but cannot. Try repairing permissions with Disk Utility and restart. It takes a while to run.

If that doesn't do it, we might try deleting the tmp directory and seeing what happens.

Just to make sure there is nothing wrong with /private, try this in the terminal:

ls -al /private/

It should look like this:

drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root wheel 204 May 6 2008 .

If the permissions are not correct, it might not be able to make the tmp directory. If they aren't correct and repair permissions doesn't fix it, we can do it manually.

Edit: Oops, I re-read what you wrote and it appears that the permissions are correct. So, I don't know why it is having problems. Below was my original response.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The line that ends with the dot ( . ) is the one we need and we need the permissions, which are the drwxr-xr-x@ part. The . is unix shorthand for the directory that you asked about. In this case /private. Two dots indicate the parent directory. The dates are not important in this case. I can't remember which one it is, but I think it shows the created date.

Message was edited by: Barney-15E

This makes me wonder if there is a file inside of tmp that it cannot delete for some reason. However, I would think the commands are run as root, so that shouldn't cause a problem.

See if /tmp exists

ls -al /tmp

It is just a link to /private/tmp, so it will have this at the end of the line if found:

/tmp -> private/tmp