Vijay Kumar's Blog: Xorg startx problem

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Xorg startx problem

The problem is with starting the X windows on the FC-4 box. When doing "startx" at the command prompt with root user, "startx" is starting successful session of X window. It is failing for all the user other than root with the following error message.

Cannot move old log file ("/var/log/Xorg.0.log" to "/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old"
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at
http://wiki.X.Org for help.

The problem is with the permissions on /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg

Doing this $ chmod u+s /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg
and confirming /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg file
owner as root.root will do the trick.

Now... X windows is running great.

cheers,
make world open...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Vijay,

You are a life saver! I thought I was going to have to reinstall, but your advice fixed my problem; 11/27/2006 05:31:00 AM
Anonymous said...: Hi Vijay. Thanks for your post. I've been getting the following errors when trying to run startx as normal user on Fedora core 6:

fedora-laptop login: benny
Password:
Last login: Tue Dec 12 19:25:19 on tty3
[benny@fedora-laptop ~]$ startx
xauth: creating new authority file /home/benny/.serverauth.2196
xauth: (stdin):2: unknown command "32b8fb981fb5a9df880e7caf28eddd82"

Fatal server error:
Cannot move old log file ("/var/log/Xorg.0.log" to "/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old"

So following your instructions I changed the permissions of the Xorg file to:

[root@fedora-laptop bin]# chmod u+s ./Xorg
[root@fedora-laptop bin]# ls -lc Xorg
-rws--x--x 1 root root 1820836 Dec 12 20:02 Xorg

and I can start X as a normal user again. Thankyou!

Note: on FC6 Xorg is in /usr/bin/Xorg

not in /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg; 12/13/2006 01:37:00 AM