[arch-general] X fails to start after editing ~/.xinitrc

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:29:29 +0400, Igor Mosyagin wrote:

> Hello there.
> 
> Would your system still fail with empty .xinitrc? (mv ~/.xinitrc
> ~/dangerous_xinitrc && touch ~/.xinitrc)

Yes, the system fails with empty ~/.xinitrc. 

Actually it supposed to fail according with this snippet from "Testing X" 
chapter of Beginner's Guide:

"... there will be an empty .xinitrc file in your $HOME that you need to 
either delete or edit in order to start a graphical environment. Simply 
deleting it will cause X to run with the default environment (twm, 
xclock, 
xterm)."

In my case X starts only if ~/.xinitrc file does not exist at all.

> Is that line is only one you have in your .xinitrc? 

Yes, I have only 2 lines I mentioned in my original post.

> Do you have system xinitrc? (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc)

Yes, I do.

> Is it empty?

No, it is not. It's rather full and contains all default entries, since 
I've never touched it.


Another thing to mention. As I've found that the error I reported 
originally:

"/usr/bin/startx: Line 127: hostname: command not found",

apparently has nothing to do with the problem.

It is displayed each time I successfully start X and then kill it. The 
error then reported upon X exit. It looks to me now that Karol's 
suggestion of hostname being deprecated is correct and is the reason of 
the error being thrown up.

So, the only thing remained for now :-) is to find why X fails start with 
~/.xinitrc present and being edited as suggested by guide.