[SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

am2on · 2015-07-12 18:59:33

I just installed Arch yesterday and spent the entire day configuring the system and getting it to my liking. Everything was going well (I made changes to .Xresources and xrdb'd them incrementally) and then decided to try changing the font. I think I tried changing the font to Monospace, but I suppose I didn't actually have the font installed because after I applied the changes to Xresources and opened the terminal all I got were vertical bars instead of any actual characters. I removed the URxvt.font line and merged the changes, but the "font" still just displayed "||" bars for every character. By now, it was getting late, and I decided to go to sleep and try to fix the problem today.

I boot up Arch and try to open urxvt from a shortcut on my desktop. Nothing came up. Weird, so I ran "urxvt" from XFCE's terminal, and still nothing happened, with no logs or error messages appearing either. I ran "urxvt" from XFCE terminal again while monitoring htop, and it seems as though the urxvt process is never started (or, if it is started, it dies instantly).

I thought perhaps my compositor might be doing something funny (as I had true transparency enabled as well, though it was working fine before the font thing), so I stopped compton and tried running urxvt again (no luck).

Since then, I've tried removing various lines in my .Xresources that could be messing things up, such as URxvt.depth and background and so forth, and then running xrdb -merge. For good measure, I even rebooted my computer to make sure that X got restarted as well, but urxvt still will not run.

I tried some Googling, but all I got was a single Arch Linux forum post of a guy who had a similar problem last year, but he solved it by restarting X (I however have restarted X, even my entire computer, multiple times, to no avail).

Currently, my .Xresources simply contains

URxvt.scrollBar: false
URxvt.intensityStyles: false

as well as some definitions for a custom color scheme that aren't worth including.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Last edited by am2on (2015-07-12 21:21:18)

Trilby · 2015-07-12 19:18:35

From your XFCE terminal run the following, then post the output (via a paste-bin like site):

strace urxvt

You may need to install strace if you don't already have it. There's also a good chance that this will produce a lot of output, so you'll likely want to redirect the stderr to a file:

strace urxvt 2>filename.log

am2on · 2015-07-12 19:24:56

The output wasn't long at all; I got

execve("/usr/bin/urxvt", ["urxvt"], [/* 34 vars */]) = -1 ENOEXEC (Exec format error)
write(2, "strace: exec: Exec format error\n", 32strace: exec: Exec format error
) = 32
exit_group(1)                           = ?
+++ exited with 1 +++

Trilby · 2015-07-12 20:28:58

Odd - as far as I know that error suggest that urxvt was built for the wrong architecture. Please post the output of the following:

uname -a

pacman -Qi linux

pacman -Qi rxvt-unicode

file /usr/bin/urxvt

am2on · 2015-07-12 21:21:00

Oh dear, it seems I went full idiot on this one...
I realized after running "pacman -Qi rxvt-unicode" (and it returning "package not found") that I actually did not install the official rxvt-unicode package, but an unofficial one from the AUR called rxvt-unicode-pixbuf. The reason for this was that I was seeking functionality for changing urxvt's icon to something more aesthetically pleasing, which apparently could not be done with the regular version.

I removed rxvt-unicode-pixbuf and tried to install the regular rxvt-unicode, but apparently simply removing the AUR version with pacman -R was not enough, because it left behind old urxvt files in places like /usr/bin and /usr/lib. When I tried installing the regular one with pacman, I got a whole list of conflicting files that remained from rxvt-unicode-pixbuf.
I removed the conflicting files manually, as I wasn't sure how else to do that, and then reinstalled rxvt-unicode. It worked fine, and urxvt now works fine.

Thank you for the help, Trilby

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-07-13 07:22:45

am2on wrote:

list of conflicting files

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … 9.22_error

Arch Linux

#1 2015-07-12 18:59:33

[SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

#2 2015-07-12 19:18:35

Re: [SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

#3 2015-07-12 19:24:56

Re: [SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

#4 2015-07-12 20:28:58

Re: [SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

#5 2015-07-12 21:21:00

Re: [SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

#6 2015-07-13 07:22:45

Re: [SOLVED] Urxvt Won't Start

Board footer