X won't start; save session prob's
 

For some reason, X didn't save the session properly (I think Opera might've had something to do with it). I managed to boot it up using xinit, and from the X window gnome-session --failsafe, but I'd like to get startx to work again. When I invoke startx, it freezes up when it loads the window manager. When I abort it using ctrl-mod-bkspc, it says "Failed to read save session file..." The file it says doesn't exist. Some help please????:confused:

is there a hidden file in your home directory called ".xsession"?

the "." makes it hidden. You can try deleting it:

cd ~
rm .xsession


Don't forget the "."

-K

Nope.

I am reaching here, but whatever file that is says it can't read and you say doesn't exist....

touch /wherever/that_filename

and see if that helps

-K

Maybe I should go a little more in depth here. I'm using Redhat 8.0. The directory is /.metacity/sessions, and then the file is a *.ms file. Should I just change my window manager to sawfish? How would I go about doing this?

Okay, I am not an X-Windows expert by an stretch of the imagination.. but lets run this down....

When typing "startx" this thing will hang, but you can get it to work with failsafe settings. This makes it sound like user environment for sure.

Can you get "startx" to work for another user? If so, can you try deleting the .metacity/sessions directory from the troublesome user and copying the same directory over from the user that works? (Set permissions appropriately of course.)

-KevinJ

Actually, a friend of mine and I just dove into it and just fiddled around with my xinitrc and just had it run gnome-session --failsafe. Thanks for your help anyway. :)