[SOLVED] AwesomeWM extremely slow to start

slack_ · 08-29-2014, 04:13 PM

A totally random thing just started happening out of nowhere today. I was browsing in firefox on Slackware and it suddenly froze. No response whatsoever. I ended up having to kill the process.

So I did so, and once I restarted my computer I found that AwesomeWM won't start. I get to the login and run startx, and everything starts up fine, I can even see my wallpaper. AwesomeWM on the other hand, fails to start. I can't see my status bars, I can't open a terminal, or run any commands. I don't even have any other information, because I wasn't tweaking anything. It just happened out of nowhere.

EDTI: Tried with fluxbox instead of awesome, and it works perfectly. So it's clearly a problem with AwesomeWM.

moisespedro · 08-29-2014, 04:19 PM

Go to another tty and see the messages there, also check Xorg.0.log

slack_ · 08-29-2014, 04:28 PM

It appears to be a problem with one of the colors in my theme.lua. When I switch to a different tty I see an error generated by X:

Code:

W: awesome: color_init_reply:137: awesome: error, cannot allocate color '#333333'
E: awesome: signal_fatal:230: signal 11, dumping backtrace
.....

I've changed that color in my theme.lua, but when I restart it simply says the same error with the new color.

EDIT: I'll be a bit more specific. What happens is that I start X and it seems to work, I can see my wallpaper, and the mouse moves just fine. Then I switch to TTY1 and see this:

Code:

AIGLX: Suspending clients for VT switch

It just hangs there, and then I hit C^ and that's when I see the above errors and the backtrace. The backtrace is very small and at the end there's:

Code:

xinit: unexpected signal 2

Almost seems like the backtrace didn't even finish.

jamesf · 08-29-2014, 04:38 PM

I've had similar problems with X itself when killing it in odd circumstances.

There _might_ be a lock file (usually in in /var/run, I think) that didn't get let go of properly. X does some files in /home/<user> and /tmp, I believe.

Try checking /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog to see if any errors got thrown there.

Also, look in your /home/<user> for hidden (starting with a period) files and directories to see if something got stuck in there. .config, for instance, often has that kind of stuff generally and .kde if you're a kde user. Though those files are usually more program specific than DE specific.

You could always drop to runlevel 3 and 'startx >somelogfilename' and then check that to see if anything got printed to stderr.

Good luck!

EDIT: look for files created around the time of the last successful start of your DE/WM when looking for files and the time of the most recent start attempt when checking logs. You probably know this, but for the sake of completeness I had to mention it.

slack_ · 08-29-2014, 04:48 PM

Honestly I don't really see anything that makes sense pertaining to the problem. The only thing I can find on the internet is this: https://awesome.naquadah.org/bugs/in...s&task_id=1195

But that is in no way helpful at all. I don't get it, everything was fine and then it just magically stopped working. The only lead I have is that firefox randomly froze and crashed before I restarted. That was the last thing that happened.

jamesf · 08-29-2014, 04:56 PM

Create a new user and start Awesome from the new user. If the problem persists then the problem is system-wide, if the problem does not occur then something is broken in your usual user's configuration.

slack_ · 08-29-2014, 04:57 PM

Thanks great idea. I will try.

EDIT: Hmm, well idk what I did, but it works now. I just woke up this morning and tried and it worked fine. Sorry the solution can't be more helpful.