Arch Linux

olivarch

Member

Registered: 2013-01-26

Posts: 47

E233: cannot open display

Hi,

I'm coming from Fedora, and I was used to do things like that :

su -
gvim  (or any command with a GUI)

Now, on my newly installed arch I cannot do it anymore, when I do it I get this error :
E233: cannot open display

If I do :
su
gvim

then it works.

From what I understand by doing "su -" I log as root, without all the  settings from my user environment.
Conclusion, I should just add the correct settings. Unfortunately it's not very straight forward...
The basic thing is to do :
export DISPLAY=:0.0

But I have to do it each time I log.
I tried to put it into .bashrc, but it's not working.

I tried to look at .Xauthority, linking it from my user account etc... but that was very confusing...

I tried to look on a Fedora system what as the difference, but  nothing obvious there...

Regards,
Oliv

=================================================

I found this page that explain quite well what  I should do :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ru … ps_as_root

and more precisely :

"     Permanently allow root access

        Globally in /etc/profile

Add the following to /etc/profile

export XAUTHORITY=/home/non-root-usersname/.Xauthority

This will permanently allow root to connect to a non-root user's X server. "

But, I lost my .Xauthority into my user account :
I tried to link it to $XAUTHORITY (some experiment to solve my mprobleme...) but $XAUTHORITY is changing at every boot...

Last edited by olivarch (2013-02-02 12:28:22)