I'm not clear from your reply what you did to fix things, but from your
initial message it looked like you had the seatd daemon running and playing
gatekeeper. As configured on Devuan, it generally enforces that only users
in the video group can start X. Theoretically this whole mess helps if you
want to have a single computer with multiple keyboards and mice connected
so multiple people can use it simultaneously, but it does make things more
complicated to just use a computer the way we mortals set one up. I use
lightdm, and it starts XOrg with the option -seat seat0, so that might be
something wanted/needed in other configurations as well.

Regards,
Timothy Gaskell

On Thu, 13 Aug 2026, 7:28 pm Walter Dnes, <waltdnes@???> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2026 at 11:05:23AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote
> > Things get "curiouser and curiouser".
>
> More like "everything you know is wrong". It took me a while but I
> think I've figured things out...
>
> - starting X with the command "startx" from the text console defaults to
> a session on DISPLAY :0 running in TTY6.
>
> - starting X with a script in TTY2 ressults in a sessuon on TTY2. The
> script for user2 is...
> #! /bin/bash
> DISPLAY=:1
> startx -- -depth 16
>
> and the .xonitrc is...
> # FontPath /usr/share/fonts/misc
> # Or from an xterm
> /usr/bin/xterm -e xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/misc && xset fp rehash &
> [ -f ~/.Xresources ] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
> /usr/bin/xterm -bg black -fg cyan -geometry 50x24+0+0 -fn
> lucidasanstypewriter-12 &
> /usr/bin/xterm -e xrandr --display :1 --size 1024x768 &
> xset dpms 240 256 260 &
> xset led +num -caps -scroll &
> exec /usr/bin/icewm > ~/.icewm.log 2>&1
>
> --
> Walter Dnes <waltdnes@???>
> There are 2 types of people in this world
> 1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data
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