I loaded up a xterm and tried to type in a program and it gave me an error
xlib :: no protocol specified
invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1

what the hell is a mit magic cookie and how do i configure them (or it or whatever)?

also it seems that my prompt is not uniform throught the shells (one shell gives bash-2.05 and the other gives out root@localhost) how can i make them all root@localhost?

Thanks

This is setup in your .bashrc file or /etc/profile. If your a regular user that gets the bash-2.05 prompt and only get root@localhost when your logged in as root, you need to create a .bashrc file for your user in their home directory.

Simple way of doing it is this:

cat /etc/profile > /home/<username>/.bashrc

This will copy profile and create the file .bashrc. Then you can go edit it accordingly to your desire, etc.

thanks trickykid for the help. Can anyone tell me what a Mit Magic Cookie is though?

I think it is the authentication token used by the display manager. This error probably indicates something like "you tried to start a program from a terminal as root (or some other user other than the logged in one) when logged into X", no?

It is created when you run "startx" under slackware. See /usr/X11R6/bin/startx where it states:

authdisplay=${display:-:0}
mcookie=`mcookie`

From my reading, you can then set it up to have this cookie filed in the Xauthority file and then be accessible to other users if needed. Or something like that...

Hope this is correct...