X11 no longer starts

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

It seems I've gotten myself into some real trouble, and the problem is I have no idea how/why. Hence the cross-posting...

I can no longer launch the X11 environment in which I did almost all my work and that's crucial for displaying remote applications.

The original XQuartz environment has been crashing for me for years now so I've been running the MacPorts xorg-server-devel port (1.20.10) in a build of my own that enables some additional features such as xephyr.

Yesterday my session started to become instable (nothing to do with X11) after about 65 days of uptime so I quit everything, logged off and rebooted. That's when the problems started, but I think I did something I shouldn't have done before that.

The X11 application shell launches, but the actual X server doesn't, at least not in my own account.

After a good while waiting I'm getting this message in the system.log:

Feb 16 21:43:36 Portia.local org.macosforge.xquartz.X11.stub[2110]: launch_msg("CheckIn") IPC failure: Operation not permitted                                                                                                            

Googling served up someone who got this after setting the PATH in the launchctl environment (~/.MacOSX/environment.plist) and that removing that and rebooting help him.
It doesn't for me (I tried both removing the PATH specification and restoring the plist from before, rebooting both times).

Starting from the commandline gives
```
# /opt/local/bin/startx -- /opt/local/bin/Xquartz
font_cache: Scanning user font directories to generate X11 font caches                              
privileged_startx: bootstrap_look_up(org.macports.privileged_startx): Unknown service name                           
font_cache: Updating FC cache                                                                                        
font_cache: Done                                                                                                     
expr: syntax error                                                                                                   
expr: syntax error                                                                                                   
expr: syntax error                                                                                                   
xauth:  file /Users/bertin/.serverauth.1969 does not exist                                                           
                                                                                                                     
xauth:  timeout in locking authority file /Users/bertin/.Xauthority                                                  

No protocol specified


waiting for X server to begin accepting connections .
No protocol specified

..
```

The "No protocol specified" and ".." lines start about when the X11 application opens and are repeated indefinitely until I quit that application. The message about org.macports.privileged_startx is normal: I moved that plist to LaunchDaemons-disabled long ago for reasons I cannot remember but it was clearly not crucial.
I also moved the org.*.startx.plist files to LaunchAgents-disabled because I don't need on-demand starting of the X11 server and prefer to have a "normal" DISPLAY variable of the ":0" style .

My .xinitrc generates output, and that isn't being generated anymore. Moving the entire file aside or removing the plist in ~/Library/Preferences don't solve anything either.

Curiously, when I log in to my fallback admin account the X11 server still starts as it should: without long delays or any other issue. It's of course not set up properly but things seem to work normally otherwise.

Any idea how to triage this problem, or any suggestions what I could try to unblock this?

FWIW, I'm still running 10.9.5 .

Thanks a LOT in advance!

René