Quartz no longer launching when an X application is invoked

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

'Quartz' has nothing to do with X11, its the primary compositor used by 
macOS itself to render graphics.

I assume you are actually taking about the X11 server, which in MacPorts 
is provided by the 'xorg-server' port and historically was provided by 
the 'XQuartz' package.

Some basic questions.

1. What installation of the X11 server are you using ? the MacPorts 
provided one or something else ?

2. Regardless of your answer to 1., try (re)installing the MacPorts 
provided one

  > sudo port uninstall xorg-server
  > sudo port install xorg-server

Then log out and back in again. This step is important as if you skip it 
things do not work correctly.

3. Finally, in order for the automatic starting of the X11 server on 
demand to work, you need your DISPLAY variable set correctly. It should 
look something like

$ echo $DISPLAY
/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.TwDg8TRtvI/org.macosforge.xquartz:0

i.e. it needs to refer to a launchd socket. If you see something else 
instead you like are overriding this somewhere and you need to find and 
remove this.

Chris

On 30/11/2023 5:30 am, Kenneth Wolcott wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> Quartz no longer launching when an X application is invoked
> 
> The first time I had installed some ports that were dependent on
> Quartz I had difficulty getting them to start because Quartz was not
> running.
> 
> The first solution was to manually invoke Quartz, which worked ok.
> 
> I then was able to get Quartz to start via Launch when an X
> application was invoked.
> 
> Recently (?) it stopped working and I'm not sure why.
> 
> All research I've done so far has been fruitless, I'm just not asking
> the right questions...
> 
> I'm back to manually starting Quartz.
> 
> Please show me how to diagnose the problem and also to solve it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ken Wolcott