Solved XFCE runs on root only (newby)

PacketMan

PacketMan

Hi all,

I'm brand new to the world of FreeBSD. I used to do a little UNIX admin work years ago on DEC Alphas, but then I choose to go hard core Cisco inter-networking. Juniper is relatively new to me, and since its JUNOS runs on FreeBSD and I am farting around with Bittorrent SYNC I thought why not.

So I took an old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop and blew away the XP. Got FreeBAD 10 installed, BT Sync running, and just finished the XFCE installation. I can 'startx' and get the gui going when I am logged in as root. But if I log in using my non-root account, all I get is a black screen when starting x. Sometimes the PC MMI (man machine interface - keyboard) becomes unresponsive so I have to power down.

Any thoughts on what this could be? What should I be looking for. When I launch I do see some "....not found" messages but I see some of those when launching from root. They go up the screen so fast I can't really catch it.

BTW, I am really liking the FreeBSD 10 cli....feels very UNIXish and is bringing back old Dec Alpha UNIX memories. Thank you all for your FreeBSD contributions so far and I hope I can contribute too. :)
 
When you run as a non-root user, do you have an .xinitrc file in that user's home directory? Sounds like it might be missing. The .xinitrc file is normally where the command would reside to start the desktop or window manager, which in your case would be XFCE. If startx(1) works for the root user, there is most likely a /root/.xinitrc file which you could copy to the home directory of the non-root user to get XFCE to start for that user also. Of course you would have to change the owner:group of the file to make it usable for the non-root user after the copy operation.
 
I decided to revisit xfce. You were bang on. I had done it for the root account, but missed the part about having to do it for each other account. Thank you.
 
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