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biocyberman

Member

Registered: 2015-06-29

Posts: 4

startx failed, fatal error

I can startx with root account but suddenly not with my normal user account.

$>startx
# long list of arguments
# at the end shows something like this:
Fatal server error
Unrecognized option: vt1
Server connection refused

I have deleted my ~/.xinitrc, and I have no ~/.xserverrc file, which means everything is loaded from either /etc/X11/xinit/ or /usr/share/X11/. But the error stays the same. So I don't understand the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help

Last edited by biocyberman (2015-08-14 00:42:14)

george55

Member

Registered: 2011-08-10

Posts: 68

Re: startx failed, fatal error

I had the exact same issue. Some package is causing this problem - not sure which one. Xorg log and the systemd journal log provided zero insight for me. To fix it (for the time being) I downgraded several recently installed packages (pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/XXXXXX). Here is what I downgraded:

[2015-08-14 07:14] [ALPM] downgraded mesa (10.6.4-1 -> 10.6.3-1)
[2015-08-14 07:14] [ALPM] downgraded mesa-libgl (10.6.4-1 -> 10.6.3-1)
[2015-08-14 07:25] [ALPM] downgraded lib32-glibc (2.22-1 -> 2.21-4)
[2015-08-14 07:25] [ALPM] downgraded lib32-gcc-libs (5.2.0-2 -> 5.2.0-1)
[2015-08-14 07:25] [ALPM] downgraded lib32-mesa (10.6.4-1 -> 10.6.3-1)
[2015-08-14 07:25] [ALPM] downgraded lib32-mesa-libgl (10.6.4-1 -> 10.6.3-1)

After this downgrade, X worked again.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,564

Website

Re: startx failed, fatal error

# long list of arguments
# at the end shows something like this:

What?  We need to see complete error messages and output to have the faintest idea what is going on.

George, I don't know how you can say you had exactly the same issue as there is virtually no information here on what the issue is.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

biocyberman

Member

Registered: 2015-06-29

Posts: 4

Re: startx failed, fatal error

@Trilby
Yeah, it is not a typical and proper way to report my problem. Unfortunately I had the problematic computer at one place and wrote the question with another computer at another place. I only captured the most important piece of information.

@george55: I downgraded the packages you mentioned but I did not help.

Well, solved it the hard way:
I digged into /usr/bin/startx script and read through the file and found what I consider fragile part:

        tty_num=$(echo "$tty" | grep -oE '[0-9]+$')
        vtarg="vt$tty_num"

I have this in my environment somewhere (yes, again imprecise), and fortunately I could grep it out from my .bash_aliases:

export GREP_OPTIONS="--color=always"
alias grep='grep --color=auto'

This settings cause grep to result in output with color code, which messes up downstreap programs. So the fix is

       unset GREP_OPTIONS # remove nasty grep options. 
        tty_num=$(echo "$tty" | \grep -oE '[0-9]+$') # revert grep alias
        vtarg="vt$tty_num"

Last edited by biocyberman (2015-08-17 15:31:43)