X11 no longer starts

[Jeremy Sequoia]

I suggest moving aside all of your shell init scripts (~/.bash_profile et al) and seeing if that helps.

Note the privileged startx job is necessary for setting up correct permissions on the paths in /tmp and caching fonts.

Sent from my iPhone...

> On Feb 16, 2024, at 13:50, René J.V. Bertin <rjvb at vivaldi.net> wrote:
> 
> 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