Arch Linux

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

[solved] xfce4 won't start, "unable to load failsafe session"

Hello, after a recent upgrade (i guess), I restarted xfce4 and I am now receiving this error message:

Unable to load failsafe session
Unable to determine a failsafe session name. Possible causes:
xfconfd isn't running (D-Bus setup problem);
environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set incorrectly (must include "/etc"),
or xfce4-session is installed incorrectly

While trying to restart xfce4 again.

I'm using the radeon driver for an ati card btw.

I have dbus and hal installed. I am using openbox just fine at this very moment, except that it won't logout without a ctrl-alt-backspace. So something is wrong. I wish to have xfce4 running again though.

I have a very minimal xorg.conf, with no errors in my Xorg.0.log.

Did this happen to anyone else? I searched the forum and people fixed this same error message by installing dbus, but I have dbus installed... so it's weird.

Last edited by efourseven (2009-05-08 04:38:01)

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Re: [solved] xfce4 won't start, "unable to load failsafe session"

by the way, does anyone knows where this $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS variable is?

efourseven

Member

Registered: 2005-07-03

Posts: 71

Re: [solved] xfce4 won't start, "unable to load failsafe session"

Fixed. I think.... I have xfce4 running. I added an InputDevice for the keyboard in my xorg.conf. I cut too much out of it! some keys arn't working though... this I have to figure out now.

Note: the update broke my initial xorg.conf. I used hwd to create a new one and cut it down to barely anything. I added input devices for keyboard and monitor and it gets me into xfce4 with no error.

carus

Member

Registered: 2007-09-26

Posts: 15

Re: [solved] xfce4 won't start, "unable to load failsafe session"

I had the same problem and thought I had dbus running!

I tried pacman -S dbus and apparently that solved it. I also added dbus to the daemons list - do not know if you have to!

scarecrow

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2004-11-18

Posts: 715

Re: [solved] xfce4 won't start, "unable to load failsafe session"

Do you run Arch64?
If so, then
# pacman -Sy dbus
This thing will install "dbus *permissive-1" which, suprisingly enough, is not a dependency of xfce4. I don't know if it's built like that on purpose, or it's just a blunder... but it would make more sense to me if XFCE4 depended on that package.
After installing that and restarting hal (which wouldn't run properly, anyway) your XFCE4 should start.

I discovered that just recently on a virtual machine (normally I run 32-bit, and there is no such issue there).

Last edited by scarecrow (2009-05-18 18:37:16)

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