Missing .Xauthority file.

ArchDevel · 2019-02-09 04:19:52

Hello all,

New to the forums, fairly familiar with Arch Linux. This is my 6th fresh install and each one seems to be more polished than the last. However, I have seemingly broke something. Lol.

I have ArchLinux up and running with LxQt and i3 and LightDm with the webkit 2 archlinux theme. I had no issues out of the installation until I increased the size of my / partition using fdisk. I took 15g from my home partition and added it to my / partition. Ran e2fsck -f and then resize2fs to grow the file system on /.

I recreated the filesystem on the home partition and rebooted and came to my lovely login screen only to be greeted with a login loop. I enter my credentials, hit enter, lightdm successfully opens a session for my user, but fails to open X authority. Systemctl status lightdm.service returns:

"Error writing X authority: Failed to open X authority /home/user/ .Xauthority: Permission denied"

But there is no .Xauthority file in the directory at all. And I cannot seem to get x to create one. This problem persist with other DM's that I have tried as well. Running startx from the tty fails as well with an error of:

"xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/user/ .Xauthority"

Xinit gives up and complains about a refused connection to the X server. I'm stumped on this one. After the resize operation I did have some problems with permissions of the home directory and had to switch ownership back to my user and set the permissions. I have tried reinstalling the Desktop Enviroments, Desktops Managers, as well as X to no avail. Ideas?

Last edited by ArchDevel (2019-02-09 04:24:22)

seth · 2019-02-09 08:56:47

I recreated the filesystem on the home partition

Output of

id <username>
stat ~<username>
df -h

replace "<username>" w/ your actual username.
You can use https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pastebin to post it.

ArchDevel · 2019-02-09 12:49:32

Hey! Thank you for your reply, I got it worked out. But would like to know what caused this. It was a permissions issue, I had originally set the permissions of the /home/user directory to 500 as I read that was Arch Linuxs default. But I dont that was correct, resetting the permissions to 777 solved all issues.

Attempted to build a few packages from the AUR and pkgbuild was not able to create the makefiles in the home directory as needed, this is what tipped me off that the permissions still weren't correct.

What about the resize operation did I do that screwed up the permissions and handed everything over to root? Or is this a part of linux I just haven't came to understand yet?

~ArchDevel

seth · 2019-02-09 14:32:18

$HOME should™ be 700, 500 is a non-starter (because you cannot write into your $HOME- wherever you read that drops off your bookmark list *now*)
w/o knowing details of "the resize operation" it's impossible to tag the cause, but if you recreate the FS you likely also recreated directories by hand and/or restored them from a copy which mght have transferred the ownership to root.

Arch Linux

#1 2019-02-09 04:19:52

Missing .Xauthority file.

#2 2019-02-09 08:56:47

Re: Missing .Xauthority file.

#3 2019-02-09 12:49:32

Re: Missing .Xauthority file.

#4 2019-02-09 14:32:18

Re: Missing .Xauthority file.

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