xfce doesn't stay put!

[Arjen Stolk]

Cristel,

On 3/5/06, Christel Robert <c.robert at inx.co.za> wrote:
> This is what I get when I start in failsafe, chinese to me:
>
> christel at christel:~$ startxfce4
> /usr/bin/startxfce4: X server already running on display :0.0
> Agent pid 7993
> esd: Esound sound daemon already running or stale UNIX socket
> /tmp/.esd-1000/socket
> This socket already exists indicating esd is already running.
> Exiting...
> _IceTransTransNoListen: unable to find transport: tcp
> _IceTransmkdir: ERROR: euid != 0,directory /dev/X will not be created.
> _IceTransmkdir: ERROR: Cannot create /dev/X

I have no way of trying this, so I cannot guarantee it will work, but
I found somthing that looks relevant while googling for
"_IceTransTransNoListen". The hint came from somebody who had a
similar problem with gnome-session failing in ubuntu. For some reason
a file named ".ICEAuthority" gets the wrong permissions and then
things stop working.

Start another failsafe terminal and type "ls -l .ICEauthority". This
shows you which user/group owns the file and what permissions for
reading/writing it has. As far as I can tell, the owner should be you,
i.e. your login name, christel. The permissions is the list with
dashes and letters. Mine is showing "-rw- - - - - - -" (minus the
spaces, but that's just for clarity in this email.)

If you aren't the owner, for example, it may say "root" a couple of
times, the you can change that by typing
"sudo chown christel ~/.ICEauthority"
(this will probably ask for your password).
Then you can change the permissions on the file by typing
"chmod u+rw ~/.ICEauthority"

Try this and see if it works now.

- Arjen