When my daughter tries to start xfce4 on her account on my main machine (slack-current, AMD Athlon 2500XP, 256M Ram), X starts up, loads the nvidia drivers and then quits again. Here is the error message that it kicks out when it does it:

/usr/bin/startxfce4: Starting X server
_XSERVTransSocketOpenCOTSServer: Unable to open socket for inet6
_XSERVTransOpen: transport open failed for inet6/trooper:0
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: failed to open listener for inet6

X Window System Version 6.8.2
Release Date: 9 February 2005
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 6.8.2
Build Operating System: Linux 2.4.29 i686 [ELF]
Current Operating System: Linux trooper 2.6.8.1 #1 Sun Dec 19 18:29:43 CET 2004 i686
Build Date: 13 February 2005
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.X.Org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Tue Mar 8 22:39:07 2005
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"

(EE) Failed to load module "speedo" (module does not exist, 0)
(II) Initializing extension GLX
Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/, removing from list!
Agent pid 25324
/usr/local/bin/xfce4-session: error while loading shared libraries: libxfce4mcs-client.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No
such file or directory
Agent pid 25324 killed

waiting for X server to shut down xscreensaver: 22:39:11: SIGHUP received: restarting...
xscreensaver: 22:39:11: initial effective uid/gid was kschulze/shadow (502/43)
xscreensaver: 22:39:11: running as kschulze/users (502/100)

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

She can start KDE with no problems. It just seems that she can't start xfce4. (I am running xfce4 4.2.0.) Funny thing is, I can start xfce4 just fine. In fact it is running now and I use it as my main desktop.

Has this happened to anyone else? Any thoughts on how to fix this? I tried `locate libxfce4mcs-client.so.1` but it didn't return any hits.

TIA.

Try to reinstall xfce, and it would be great idea to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf

comment these lines like that:

# Load "speedo"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/"

Open "/usr/X11R6/bin/startx" file with your text editor, search that line and edit it like that:

serverargs="-nolisten tcp"

That it will fix all your "ERROR" and "Warning" messages from startx

Good luck!

C-

Thanks for the tips on removing those irritiations, but she is still not able to start xfce4. I can start xfce4 from my account, and she can start kde, gnome, etc. - just not xfce4.

I moved her .xfce4 directory to oldxfce4, thinking that there might be some configuration file in there that was messing it up. But, that didn't fix it.

Searching through the package listings at slackware.org, I see that there was a libxfce4mcs-client.so.1.0.1 in slack 10.0. slack 10.1 and -current have libxfce4mcs-client.so.2.0.2. So my suspicion is that somehow when she tries to start xfce4, it is still trying to launch the older version which has now been updated/replaced. (10.0 had xfce-4.0.5; 10.1 and -current have xfce-4.2.0.) I could try a symlink from libxfce4mcs-client.so.2.0.2 to libxfce4mcs-client.so.1, but I'd rather not, if I can find the "right way" to fix this.

Rooting around through the file listing for xfce-4.2.0-i486-3 on slackware.org, I see there is a /usr/doc/libxfce4mcs-4.2.0 directory with README, NEWS and INSTALL documents, so I will give those a read when I get home tonight. I am also thinking of reading through her .xinitrc file and the system's xinitrc files to see if there is something in those that will help. (Although, I seem to remember that the startxfce4 script by-passes the xinitrc files - I could be wrong. It's probably worth a read too.)

Something like this happened to me the other day, and this is how I fixed it.

I noticed that in my ~/.xsession-errors, the xfce4-session program was saying something about not being able to do something with ICE auth., and then I noticed there were a couple files in my home dir matched .ICE*, so I deleted those files.

This let xfce4 start up again.

I don't know if your situation is the same as mine, but it sounds similar enough, so I hope this helps. I registered here just to post this message, because it was the first one I found when I put "xfce won't start" into google.

Amid all that gunk, here's the shiny nugget of your problem:
So xfce4-session cannot find the shared library libxfce4mcs-client.so.1. This would normally be for one of two reasons:

1. libxfce4mcs-client.so.1 is nowhere on the system. Fix: reinstall xfce.
2. libxfce4mcs-client.so.1 is on the system, but xfce4-session has no means of tracking it down. Fix: add the path to libxfce4mcs-client.so.1 (probably "/usr/local/lib", judging by the message you get) to the file /etc/ld.so.conf and run /sbin/ldconfig to refresh the shared library cache.