Arch Linux

caecusum

Member

Registered: 2007-08-26

Posts: 29

[Solved] Strange xterm behavior

I just completed my first install of Arch today, and have been working on getting a functional Fluxbox desktop set up.  In the interest of maintaining a leaner system I don't want to use a graphical login manager.  My workaround has been to put a "startx" command at the bottom of my .bashrc and a "exec startfluxbox" command in my .xinitrc

This was working perfectly fine for a while, but I must have made a change somewhere.  Now when I log in Fluxbox starts without errors but when I try to open an instance of xterm I get this:

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
        If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
        and start again.

Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console

After about 5 seconds of waiting, I get a normal bash prompt in the terminal.  I tried the barbaric approach of "killall -9 Xorg" and no matching processes were found.  I then tried removing the lock file mentioned in the error and opened a new terminal.  This time I got a new error:

_XSERVTransSocketINETCreateListener: ...SocketCreateListener() failed
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: server already running

Fatal server error:
Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure an X server isn't already running
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console

Could it be that in my searching for a way to launch Fluxbox without a login manager that I set it up to start in two separate locations?  Help please!

Last edited by caecusum (2007-10-06 20:17:13)

fwojciec

Member

Registered: 2007-05-20

Posts: 1,411

Re: [Solved] Strange xterm behavior

Whenever you start xterm it sources .bashrc file (like it should) and thus ends up trying to start an X session which is already running - that obviously causes problems, as you have discovered.  bashrc, in other words, is not a good place for the startx command.  What's wrong with login managers?  Sometimes it is good to be minimal about one's minimalism

Last edited by fwojciec (2007-10-06 15:02:44)

Gilneas

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2006-10-22

Posts: 320

Re: [Solved] Strange xterm behavior

You could try to put an IF before it. Maybe check to make sure it's on console 1 as well so you can use the others for killing an application that's freezing your X. (I didn't try out the code below)
if [ -z $DISPLAY ] && [ x$(tty) = x/dev/vc/1 ]; then startx; fi

caecusum

Member

Registered: 2007-08-26

Posts: 29

Re: [Solved] Strange xterm behavior

I can't believe I didn't figure this out on my own.  *sigh*

Thanks guys, I ended up just installing Slim.