X does not start for the main user, works for user2

Herve5 · 03-11-2021, 01:04 PM

I am on Debian testing, on a Lenovo P53 with an NVidia graphic card, on xfce.

(I know I shoundn't be on testing given my level, but I did this last year because at the time it seemed the only way to run the Nvidia card)

During the last system update, among lots of packages, there was a new set of Nvidia ones (and many other things). This resulted in my main user wrecking the windows manager (I hope this is the right vocabulary : no more window edges, no screen background, no way to move a window...)
In contrast, a backup 'user2', that I'm using now, just works fine.
So I imagined this was some hidden pref somewhere in user1 home that was broken -I don't know how.
But I tried diverse moves and changes from user2 to user1, with in principle the right chown -R along with them. All in all nothing worked, save that I'm probably more wrecked now than at the beginning...

Any advice on how to solve this, maybe comparing what with what betwen user1 and 2??

Thank you!!
Hervé

shruggy · 03-11-2021, 03:55 PM

Check permissions and ownership of two files: /home/user1/.ICEauthority and /home/user1/.Xauthority. They should be owned by user1 and the user should have read and write permissions for them.

Code:

-rw------- 1 user1 user1 ... .ICEauthority
-rw------- 1 user1 user1 ... .Xauthority

Herve5 · 03-12-2021, 12:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shruggy

Check permissions and ownership of two files: /home/user1/.ICEauthority and /home/user1/.Xauthority. They should be owned by user1 and the user should have read and write permissions for them.

Thank you Shruggy!

Alas, if I dare say, that's indeed the case...

Code:

 herve2@LinuxHerve:~$ ls -l /home/herve/.*
(...)
-rw-------  1 herve herve      4350 26 sept. 19:00  /home/herve/.ICEauthority
(...)
-rw-------  1 herve herve        55 11 mars  20:38  /home/herve/.Xauthority
-rw-------  1 herve herve        55 11 mars  15:08  /home/herve/.Xauthority.backup.20210311
(...)

[edit] I found something : I removed a folder named '.themes' that contained some fossil windows themes that I didn't use for 1 year, because I remembered this had brought trouble at the time. Then after two reboots (!) and 3 full minutes between log and desktop appearing... it looks like it works! -I'm going to reboot again, because if they repeat these 3mn are still quite a worry...
And indeed, after rebooting again, desktop is wrecked again. So... back to square one :-(

Herve5 · 03-15-2021, 04:21 AM

OK, I dealt with it the most basic way : bu ligging in with a separate, sudoer user2, from which I deleted ALL invisible prefs files in the faulty user1 home folder that had been modified since 24h ago.
Of course this trashed many prefs that I had to longly rebuild. But at least everything works, and run fast !