Problems with startx command
 

Hello all,

Just today, I started to have some problems with x that I have never had before. I use slack 9.1, and while booting I get the error

ERROR: Can't open display

After logging in, either as root or some other user, I try to do startx, but get the following error messages

/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 133: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Permission denied
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 134: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Permission denied
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 133: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Permission denied
Error: Can't open display:
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line145: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Permission denied

So I started to think something was wrong with the permissions on xauth. I cd into /usr/X11R6/bin, and changed the permissions to 777 just to make sure. Note, the permissions were that everyone could read before, but nothing else. In other words the permissions were 444. Now when I try to run startx I get the errors:

/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 133: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Cannot execute binary file
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 134: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Cannot execute binary file
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 133: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Cannot execute binary file
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 134: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Cannot execute binary file
Error: Can't open display:
/usr/X11R6/bin/startx: line 145: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: Cannot execute binary file

Just yesterday, everything was working fine. I installed no new software during that time, nor did I remove any software. I did not change anything in the system, so I have no idea why this is happening.

Dmesg yields nothing useful.

Thanks in advance, any help would be appreciated

I think you need to add /usr/X11R6/bin/ to your path

nope, if that was the problem it wouldn't even recognize startx as a command

well ... something must have changed, i'm thinking re install the XFree86 packages, and keep your config files.

Does your user have a ~/.Xauthority file ? You might try renaming this file and see if X re-creates it for you when executing 'startx'. Probably should change back the permissions for /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth first.