[SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

CFN · 2025-12-29 03:30:20

Hello everyone. I’m a relatively new Arch user (about 3 months), so please bear with me.

I’ve been using Arch with Hyprland and always installed it using the archinstall script. Recently, I decided to try the “good old” manual installation method and ran into an issue with Xorg and dwm after finishing the install.

The installation itself went smoothly. After the GRUB screen, I’m able to log in normally via TTY.

The problem started when I tried to install Xorg and DWM to have a window manager. These are the steps I followed:

1)First, I installed some dwm dependencies:

 sudo pacman -S base-devel git libx11 libxft xorg-server xorg-xinit terminus-font

2) Then I created the directory ~/.local/src

3)Cloned dwm from the official repository:

git clone git://git.suckless.org/dwm ~/.local/src/dwm

4)After this, inside ~/.local/src/dwm, I compiled and installed it with:

sudo make clean install

5)Then I created ~/.xinitrc with

exec dwm

6)Rebooted the system

7)Logged in again via TTY and ran:

startx

Unfortunately, I got the following error:

(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) Cannot open log file "/home/cfn/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log"

It seems like I might be missing something, since the directory ~/.local/share/xorg/ exists but is empty.

I did all of this before installing any greeter. After encountering the error, I tried installing tuigreet, but neither the greeter nor the window manager work. At the moment, all I have is the GRUB menu and access to TTY.

I did my homework and I’ve read the DWM page on the Arch Wiki and also found a similar issue here on the forum , but that thread is quite old and only has two replies, none of which point to a solution. The wiki also doesn’t mention issues related to Xorg.0.log.

I’d really appreciate it if someone could shed some light on this issue, as I’m still a newbie.

PS: I ran pacman -Syu before installing both Xorg and DWM.

Last edited by CFN (2025-12-29 18:43:46)

system72 · 2025-12-29 03:39:18

what are the permissions on .local/share/xorg ?

ls -lhd ~/.local/share/xorg

CFN · 2025-12-29 03:47:48

Hi, system72!

So far the permissions are the following:

[cfn@archlinux] ls -lhd ~/.local/share/xorg
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Dec 29 02:25 /homecfn/.local/share/xorg

system72 · 2025-12-29 03:49:53

you can fix the issue by making your user own that directory:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.local/share/xorg

CFN · 2025-12-29 04:20:56

It worked!

After running

sudo chown -R cfn:users ~/.local/share/xorg

I was still getting an error saying that xclock and xterm were missing, which was a bit unexpected. However, it turned out to be just a matter of installing them.

Now the DWM is loading. It looks terrible, but at least it’s opening!

Thank you!

Last edited by CFN (2025-12-29 04:23:28)

system72 · 2025-12-29 04:45:09

follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xinit#xinitrc for a properly configured session the scripts inside of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d need to executed

Arch Linux

#1 2025-12-29 03:30:20

[SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

#2 2025-12-29 03:39:18

Re: [SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

#3 2025-12-29 03:47:48

Re: [SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

#4 2025-12-29 03:49:53

Re: [SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

#5 2025-12-29 04:20:56

Re: [SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

#6 2025-12-29 04:45:09

Re: [SOLVED] DWM and Xorg not working on fresh Arch install

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