On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 10:29:20AM +1100, Ralph Ronnquist via Dng wrote:
>
> Ok this confuses me greatly. Which terminal are you running that in?
> Because it shows that Xorg is running, i.e. you have started Xorg, and
> it is running.

Raph, sorry to have confused you with the work terminal. I ran the
pgrep terminal (mlterm)

> > up. I kill X to see what the terminal reported.      

Should have said the $ that results from a log in
>
> Is this on a different VT while Xorg is running on vt1?
> What's "the default window manager"?
>
> Previously you showed an uoutput that included 1 pgrep line? Has this
> changed?

No, the pgrep is there.

> I had thought the flow was the floowing:
> 1) boot the machine... and it comes up with a "login:" prompt on vt1
> 2) log in as non-root user
> 3) "$ startx"
>
> But, it sounds to me you are doing something else.

No that's exactly what I do. I created a new account, and it has the
same problem of not loading fluxbox

> Otoh, "startx" would happily start second (third, fourth ...) Xorg in
> different VT yielding different DISPLAY settings (:1.0 :2.0 ...) but
> it's not unheard of that <u>window managers</u> make the assumption
> that there is only one Xorg with display 0:0 and then get terminally
> unhappy when they can't interact with that.

I don't see how, once I've run startx, how to do it again. Fluxbox
seems to think a window manaager already running. I probably should
install a difference manager and see if the same problem occurs with
it.

>
> If I read your paragraphs right. "startx" starts and runs with an Xorg
> display taking over and covering... so it doesn't exit. It exits
> when the window magager terminates. So the question whether it runs or
> not is answered(?).

Not sure I follow this. $ startx starts Xorg. Xorg terminates only
when the window manager shuts own.

> Further, given the ~/.xinitrc above, it also shows that fluxbox is
> running. Because if it would terminate, then Xorg would terminate and
> then VT would change back to text mode and the startx stderr output
> would show up. As you say, that doesn't happen until you quit the
> window manager.

Understood. My problem was that I didn't know whether the grey with
Devuan spiral was a default winow manager.

> Though, perhaps your paragraph about that paragraph relates to having
> an edited ~/.xinitrc where the last line is "exec startfxce4" or
> something?

No the last line is exec startfluxbox. Althogh I could install fxce4
to see if my problem persists.

> All in all, I think your results tell that either a) fluxbox comes up
> and stays up until forcefully terminated, or b) fluxbox comes up but
> terminates for some reason. In both cases Xorg comes up and stays up
> until the window manager is terminated.
>
> I thought we were in case b, and it shows that the reason of fluxbox
> not being able to connect to the running Xorg belongs to that fluxbox
> startup (and not that Xorg terminating for its own reasons).

I reinstalled fluxbox to no avail.

> I do think it's pretty clear that the issue in your very
> first error log does belong to fluxbox and not Xorg. (That's not a
> "blame assignment" but rather for the purpose of focusing the bug
> chase).

Yes that conclusion very useful.

--

     Haines Brown