[wplug] Lost my X: SOLVED

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:

> System is Debian Sarge and Gnome 2.6.
>
> Somehow -- I really don't have any idea what it could have been -- my laptop 
> X server stopped permitting me to launch applications.  I don't really know 
> how to debug this because I can't open a web browser to search for help.  X 
> is still running, and Gnome, and the gnome-panel and so on. But I cannot 
> start any new applications that depend on X.
>
> The only comments I get in /var/log/XFree86.0.log look like:
> AUDIT: Wed Feb 16 18:57:02 2005: 4253 X: client 8 rejected from local host
>
> If I try to run an application from the command line, I get:
> $ firefox
> Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
> Xlib: No protocol specified
>

The solution, as suggested by various web searches (which I found in lynx, 
which I installed from the command line :):) ) was to delete the relavent 
Xauth files.  The problem was, I didn't know which files those were, since 
there were none in my home directory.

I looked at the output from ps aux | less and found that /usr/X11/bin/X 
was using the option -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth and when I removd that 
file and restarted X the problem went away.

Still no idea what happened to hose the system in the first place.

-Brandon