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I've recently attempted experimentation with Arch Linux, and have managed to get an install with basic utilities, a network manager, etc going. I plan to use the Openbox window manager, with (at least, for now) the XDM display manager. Here's what I ran in the terminal:

pacman -S xorg-xdm xorg openbox 
systemctl enable xdm.service
reboot

I then reboot the system, and copied /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc.

cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc

I added the line exec openbox-session to the end of ~/.xinitrc. I also ran chmod +x ~/.xinitrc, just to be sure. Lastly, I added openbox to ~/.xsession, and made it executable, as well.

I reboot the machine, and am taken to the XDM login prompt. I'm able to sign in successfully, however I'm simply returned directly to the login prompt. I'd like to go from login, directly to the Openbox "environment".

I admit that there is much here that I'm unfamiliar with. I've used Linux for some time, however I've done little "technical work" with windowing systems, window managers, X11, etc, so I've likely made some trivial mistake, somewhere.

EDIT:

My ~/.xsession-errors file contains the error /bin/sh line 1: /root/.xsession: Permission denied. However, using lx -l indicates .xsession is executable?

Not sure why but, simply making .xsession executable with cmod again seemed to fix the issue.

10GeV
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1 Answers1

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The behaviour suggests your session script is failing for some reason. See if your home directory now contains a ~/.xsession-errors file; if it does, it contains the error messages from your session processes.

Also, use df -h to check that the filesystem(s) containing your home directory and $TMPDIR are not 100% full; starting a X11 session requires creating a few small files to both locations, and if that fails, the session will immediately end, similar to what you're experiencing.

telcoM
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  • Thanks for the suggestions. My `~/.xsession-errors` file contains the error `/bin/sh: line 1: /root/.xsession: Permission denied`, even though `ls -l` indicates `.xsession` is executable. – 10GeV Feb 06 '21 at 23:15
  • Ok, well, I re-run `chmod` and, oddly, everything is working fine! – 10GeV Feb 06 '21 at 23:18