Arch Linux

caelia

Member

Registered: 2016-05-14

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] Changed username, now XFCE won't start

I recently changed my username, and almost everything seems to be working, but XFCE no longer starts. I've been in the habit for a long time of starting X from the command line with 'startx', and XFCE has also been my usual desktop for quite some time.

I performed the following steps:

  1) 

# useradd -m -G<list_of_groups> <new_username>

  2)  Moved all files from old to new home directory using Midnight Commander (mc). I use mc because it works on hidden files by default, and in my experience always preserves permissions and handles symlinks reasonably.

  3) 

# chown -R <new_user>.<new_group>  <new_home_directory>

And XFCE won't start.

There are some error messages from startx that seem to indicate the problem:

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfwm4": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfwm4": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfsettingsd": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfsettingsd": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfce4-panel": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfce4-panel": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfdesktop": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

(xfce4-session:2006): xfce4-session-WARNING **: Unable to launch "xfdesktop": Failed to change to directory '/home/<old_username>' (No such file or directory)

That certainly makes sense. If XFCE is looking for my old home directory, which no longer exists, then that would cause the errors. But I can't figure out where that path might be stored. It doesn't exist in any file in ~/.config/xfce4/ , nor in /etc/xdg/. It also doesn't exist in any environment variables.

What should I be looking for?

Last edited by caelia (2016-05-20 07:10:32)

Chazza

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 506

Re: [SOLVED] Changed username, now XFCE won't start

A corrupt session perhaps? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xf … on_failure

caelia

Member

Registered: 2016-05-14

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Changed username, now XFCE won't start

Yes, that was it! All these years I've been using Linux, and I never even knew about ~/.cache. Or maybe I forgot. Thanks!