I am running Slack 10 and Fluxbox 0.9.10. Everything has been working just fione untill today when I rebooted my pc from Windows XP Pro (dual boot in case you haven't figured that out yet). It booted just fine but after I logged into cli and attempted "startx" just like I always do, it hung for 20 sec or so and then I get the error

xauth time out locking /home/draax/.Xauthority file (not exact error because I am not on my box, I will edit this to the exact error when I get home. This is almost exactly what it says though.)

Then it will repeat this about 4 times and then finally log into Flux. This is frusterating because it takes so long to log in now. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be causing this? If so, any ideas as to how to fix it.

chown -R you.group /home/<your_home_directory> as root

Thank you for the fast reply Vincent_Vega.

I will try this as soon as I get home to my box. For the "you.group" I am not sure what I should put here. I am assuming "you" is my user, which would be draax.... I do not know what to put for "group". Also, what would have caused this? Why all of a sudden is this happening when it has never happened before and everything worked fine?

Just make the "group" name be your name, too. That should fix your problem. I had the exact same thing happen to me a few months ago and it bothered me no end...don't remember how I fixed it, but I just experimented till I fixed it myself--the way described here.

Thanks a bunch jonr. I will try this as soon as I get home and post results.

I've been puzzling ever since it happened to me as to what could have caused it. Like you, I'm unaware of doing anything unusual that would have changed permissions on the authority files.

Does anybody have an idea what does cause this kind of error? Or maybe I should say how a user can without knowing it may change permissions on some important files?

I tried this and get

"chown: 'draax.draax' : invalid group"

I am unsure of what to put for the group. Any ideas?

It ought to work...as far as I know. Hmm. Have you got Midnight Commander on your
setup? If you select a directory and then choose "chown" from the "File" commands,
it will show you all the available owners and groups.

Or you could always put "root" for the group and see if that works. I thought
each user always automatically got a group by the same name as the user, but I guess
not....

Also worth trying would be just

chown -R draax .

as root while in your home directory.

...I'm sorry.

The format is:

chown -R draax:draax .

with a colon, not a dot.

Try with a colon and see if it doesn't work.

I shoulda tested first.

Tried this and it did not work. Same error as before.

Tried "chown -R draax /home/draax" and this seems to have solved my problem! Thanks so much for helping me! I appreciate so much.

Well, I sure offered clumsy help, but glad you got your problem fixed.

Well johnr, you actually gave me 'correct' advice in saying:


Just not the 'exact' command. Which i figured out with your help.

So thanks again for the help!!!

You should be a diplomat.

I assume your group is 'users'. That would be standard for what I'm using. If you wanted to make a new group called "draax" and add yourself to it, that's easy too.
To see what group you're in, type "groups" and it will list all of the groups you belong to.
<edit>
and the proper command for you to use is either:
chown -R draax.users /home/draax
or
chown -R draax:users /home/draax
assuming you're part of the 'users' group. Either the '.' or the ":" delimiter is fine. They both do the same thing for that command.

Guess what happened to me about ten minutes after reading the last post in this thread?

You guessed it. No authority to run X.

This time I had to jump through countless hoops with my .bash_profile and .bashrc files to get it
fixed, and I have NO idea what happened to screw them up in the first place.

It wasn't a permissions problem this time.

Talk about coincidences, though.