startx blank screen for non-root user

arturmoczulski · 2013-03-28 09:33:05

Hey guys!

This post is not a question or inquiry for help. I'm posting about a small X.org related problem that I have found extremely bugging tonight for a few hours and a really silly solution.

I have 4 partitions on my hardrive:
sda1 - boot
sda2 - swap
sda3 - LVM
sda4 - other OS

My LVM (sda3) contains the following partitions:
artursvg-lvhome (encrypted)
artursvg-lvroot
artursvg-lvusr
artursvg-lvvar (encrypted)
artursvg-lvopt
artursvg-lvtmp (encrypted)

I am using Dell XPS 15z laptop.

I have wiped out my old OS as it was completely terrible and my last experiments have caused a lot of mess I didn't really want to deal with. Hence, I have decided to build my new OS more by myself. Also XPS 15z is a pretty uncompatible piece of hardware and requires quite a lot of tricks so I wanted to have a bit more control over what's going on.

Backing myself up with the installation guide, I took the following steps:
1. Wiped out the old partitions (besides artrsvg-lvhome).
2. Installed ArchLinux from 2013.03.01 using the previous partitioning plan, with which I was very happy.
3. Installed X.org.

pacman -S xorg-server

4. Installed drivers for my built-in Intel graphics card.

pacman -S xf86-video-intel

5. Created a user for myself artur

All that went quite smoothly, so I wanted to test the X server. I ran:

startx

Unfortunately, this resulted in a black screen hanging for a couple of minutes, followed by the below message:

No protocol specified..
No protocol specified..
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Resource temporarily unavailable
xinit: server error

and x server exists.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log did not contain any EE lines. Also, deeper examination of the log left me without a clue.

A spent a couple of hours googling around, trying to figure it out. I went through the following queries in the search engine:
startx black screen
startx black screen non-root
startx xinit: unable to connect to X server: Resource temporarily unavailable
I experimented with a lot of suggestions I found, but nothing was doing the trick.

Finally, pretty experimentally, I found the problem.

My /home is located on a separate artursvg-lvhome partition which has run out of disk space, causing X to not being able to create files in User1's home directory. There were no problems with root user, because it's home directory is located on separate partition (artursvg-lvroot).

Solution:
Make sure you have enough disk space in /home directory!

I would feel pretty embarrassed about this, if not for the fact that startx gave me completely no indication about lack of disk space and saying Resource temporarily unavailable does not obviously indicate a problem with writing temp / configuration files to the hard drive.

I hope somebody will benefit from this post and look at it if they run into probems with startx and black screen.

illusionist · 2013-03-28 12:33:37

arturmoczulski wrote:

Solution:
Make sure you have enough disk space in /home directory!

No offence but you could have added only this line to the wiki (if it is relevant) instead of writing this huge post.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-03-28 09:33:05

startx blank screen for non-root user

#2 2013-03-28 12:33:37

Re: startx blank screen for non-root user

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