I merged .Xauthority between my root and user accounts, not sure how to undo it.
 

So, I followed this:
But I can't figure out how to unmerge them.

Update: checked a few things, discovered that .Xauthority in my user's directory is owned by root, and has no read, write, or executable permissions. I tried chown [my user] .Xauthority and it changed the ownership to myself, then sudo chmod -0755 .Xauthority and it didn't change anything. Changed to su, and ran it again, and it still didn't work. I'm back to square one.

I'm not clear what you are trying to accomplish and why you would want to share your .Xauthority with root. I hope it isn't to run your gui as root. Anyway, on my machine .Xauthority looks like this:
What does yours look like at the moment?
jdk

yes, probably there is a much better way to accomplish what do you really need.

Mine looks like this:

I think this means it's part of group root. I don't know how to adjust groups on individual files.

I'm building a new kernel, and according to the slackbook article I linked to in my first post, it was to allow launching of X applications from su.

What should that accomplish?..


0) 'man xauth', # find out the options
1) 'xauth -f ~/.Xauthority list', # list contents
2) 'xauth -f ~/.Xauthority remove some.host.name:0', # remove entry for "some.host.name:0".

It was to apply read write execute permission for me, and read execute for all others. Honestly this is the first I've ever had to deal with these tools so I'm confused


step 1) didn't produce anything. I'm assuming it was supposed list the contents of the file.

What I'm trying to convey is one shouldn't change perms unless one understands why and the implications of doing so. In this case nobody suggested it and besides it's an authorization database so it would never require exec perms in the first place.


OK. So what does this return:

Well I suppose I should do deeper research before just following the guides and trying thinga. I didn't realize it didn't require perms.


stat .Xauthority returns
and strings .Xauthority returns
Now what does this mean?

'stat' shows the file is still owned by group root instead of your user and has zero access perms instead of octal 0600. 'strings' shows two authorization cookies but only one hostname so that can't be right. Maybe it would be quicker to just generate a new file.

And how would one do that?

as a normal user run
or as root
also you might want to remove that underscore from your user name
it might cause all kinds of problems

No need to reboot.

Just delete the file, logout, and login again. The GUI login will create another one.

And don't merge Xauthority files. You are far more likely to destroy the key you need to keep.

Well ok then, thanks! I'll have to remember not to follow along to guides word for word then.

Two factors about guides:
A. Their age. How recent is the guide?
B. There's more than one way to skin a potato.
jdk