lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

fommil · 2016-07-19 21:29:55

Hi all,

I am encountering an extremely bizarre behaviour on a newly installed ArchLinux.

I run lightdm and xmonad, my dotfiles are here https://github.com/fommil/dotfiles

When my laptop starts up I can log in with lightdm and everything is as it should be in xmonad land. Aaah.

But if I log out of xmonad and log back in again via lightdm.... my .Xresources (which are loaded via my .xsession file) are not loaded! I end up with an urxvt with all the default settings.

I've noticed that some daemon threads are still running after I log out, is there perhaps something weird going on with my xsession not being cleared or something? When I log out, I would expect all my user-started processes to die and for a second login to be equivalent to the first.

It's not too much of a big deal because I'd typically lock the screen or turn the laptop off rather than log out/back in, but I sometimes do that out of habit when I just want to clean my desktop.

Best regards,
Sam

Anaximander · 2016-07-19 21:41:55

Hello Gurus,

I am not sure what is going on. When I logged in yesterday, my terminal looked as it should; installed two packages that would seem to have nothing to do with xrdb (qt5-x11extras and sl) did my work and logged out for the day. I logged in today and my terminal has a white background and does not have the correct geometry?! Okay, .Xresources didn't load. xrdb ~/.Xresources. Think it's odd, so log out/log in -- white background, to small, again. Reboot, log in -- Everything is as it should be. Log out/Log in -- white background and to small. Log out, restart lightdm, log in -- everything is correct. Okay, check lightdm configuration files -- everything seems in order for, I can see the xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources line in Xsessions file under /etc/lightdm/.

Check journalctl, search for lightdm, xresources, Xresource, xrdb, urxvt and the custom urxvt names I have in my .Xresources -- nothing shows up in journal.

Look at .xsessions-error; don't find anything incremenating there.

I have no idea what is going on. When things go wonky, xrdb -query produces nothing. Nothing. When things work correclty xrdb -query shows everything. So, it seems that logging out, and then logging back in is corrupting the x resources database, and then is NOT LOADED AGAIN by lightdm. When it's wonky, I can load .Xresources and everything is as it should be when I close them and reopen them.

Anybody have any idea what I should start looking at to resolve this?

thanks,
Anax

jasonwryan · 2016-07-19 21:46:21

Remove lightdm.

Merging with the existing thread...

Anaximander · 2016-07-20 12:50:18

Okay.
<start #$!* mode>
I'm fine with removing lightdm, but when I started with linux, I got a lot of terse responses to questions along the lines of:

Q: Hey guys, Rhythmbox is doing XYZ, I can't find anything on this issue, does anyone have ideas
A1: Use VLC.
A2: Rhythmbox sux, use Amarok
A3: Amakok sucks worse, use mpd
A4: Why are using Rhythmbox?
A5: You should try XMMS
A6: I tried rhythmbox, but there were to many problems with it, so I installed SnackAmp
A7: SnackAmp? Never heard of it. Cactus Jukebox is so much better, you should try that.
A8: Hey, thanks, I'll try it out.

Is it a common occurrence with LightDM to completely trash the X Resources after updates to qt5-X11extras AND sl?
Does LightDM regularly destroy X Resources when running Xmonad on Laptops?
Is lightdm ta worst?

As I said, I'm fine with removing LightDM and installing something else that May be better, but one of the reasons I left Windows to use linux was the ability to use what I wanted to use. I left Ubuntu because it was getting to difficult to add packages I wanted without all the chaff. The glory of linux is "you control your system."
<end #$!* mode>

I searched the forums, google and even used duckduckgo to see if they might produce different results. Everything I could find pertaining to .Xresources not being loaded was to use xrdb ~/.Xresources or to make sure the syntax was correct. I know this works, what I don't know is why they are getting trashed when I log out and log in again. I'm aware of a bug in LightDM that prevents prepocessing , however the work around for that is to remove -nocpp from the Xsessions file.

Is there a new bug that's cropped up in LightDM? If there is a new bug, and LightDM is no longer actively maintained, then yeah, I may need to find a new DM; however SLiM was quite popular for some time after development stopped on it.

Fommil, you seem like you have more experience than I do; you mentioned daemon threads still running after log out, I was trying to track down somethings like that, what did you see still running?

Thanks,
Anax

jasonwryan · 2016-07-20 18:38:28

My suggestion to remove lightdm was based on the following:

it is the common vector and therefore the most likely contributing factor to your issue; effective debugging requires narrwoing down the moving parts
DM's are functionally redundant anyway
in addition, they have a well earned reputation for breaking (a brief search here turns up hundreds, if not thousands, of GDM/LightDM/SSDM/DumbDM threads
it is trivial enough to remove (and replace/restore)

As to whether it is a known bug; I neither know nor care. It is clearly what is causing you grief.

Anaximander · 2016-07-20 22:26:13

Thank you, JWR.

I agree that it's trivial to remove and/or replace. And I agree that it is clearly the cause of the issue.

For me, this is to learn more about troubleshooting and resolving my own issues. I've learned that at times it's best to abandon something because there just isn't information on it. A certain keyboard comes to mind; just couldn't get it to work. Instead of banging my head against a wall and getting utterly frustrated, it was just better and easier to go buy a new keyboard.

I may bang my head a bit further, and if I find something I'll definitely update here.

In the mean time, and with the idea that this'll be another time I must abandon something, how do we mark this a solved?

jasonwryan · 2016-07-20 22:35:17

It may still be worth looking upstream to see if there is a bug open for this. Was lightdm upgraded recently? Does downgrading to the previous version fix it? If so, what is the changelog/delta between versions?

hexd · 2016-12-03 15:34:41

I also have some urxvt config customization in my ~/.Xresources, which wasn't being loaded. I fixed this issue here by simply installing xorg-xrdb, which I always had at home but I missed when installing Arch again otherwere because I didn't install xorg-server-utils there. People here seem to have it already installed, but I'm still not sure it's really a lightdm issue.

I wonder why xorg-xrdb isn't a lightdm requirement, since it can't run the 'xrdb -merge "$file"' in the snippet below from /etc/lightdm/Xsession without that:

# Load resources
for file in "/etc/X11/Xresources" "$HOME/.Xresources"; do
    if [ -f "$file" ]; then
        echo "Loading resource: $file"
        xrdb -merge "$file"
    fi
done

But AFAIK the snippet above is the only place in lightdm that requires xrdb. Or is there anywhere else where lightdm modifies the X server resource database without using the xrdb utility? Perhaps there's something I'm missing in some file sourced by /etc/lightdm/Xsession or even in the lightdm source, but I still don't see the linkage between lightdm and the issue discussed here.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-07-19 21:29:55

lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#2 2016-07-19 21:41:55

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#3 2016-07-19 21:46:21

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#4 2016-07-20 12:50:18

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#5 2016-07-20 18:38:28

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#6 2016-07-20 22:26:13

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#7 2016-07-20 22:35:17

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

#8 2016-12-03 15:34:41

Re: lightdm / xmonad second login .Xresources is ignored?

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