Labwc cannot open display, Xauthority

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1

Leap 16.0: When I start a labwc session, open a terminal by its corresponding on-screen menu entry (left mouse button), then start an X application from this command line (e.g. “xterm &”), I get error messages like “cannot open display” and errors with Xauthority.
“firefox &” in turn runs OK.
Yes, I have tried xhost +local:… && export DISPLAY=… and the like.

2

is xwayland installed and enabled?

3

I am rather sure, because xterm works in a Gnome/Wayland session, and I think I’ve seen Xwayland in the process list. labwc -s xterm also works in a labwc session. But when I start X applications from the latter “xterm in labwc in labwc”, the error occurs again.

4

Sounds like you’re missing xwayland enablement, in the way labwc is starting up, when running a raw labwc session

Just a guess on my part.

I don’t know exactly how you’re launching labwc, but it’s probably missing --xwayland or some other similar flag

5

Some progress meanwhile. There was no ~/.Xauthority, so I did:

  • Fetching the fqp following -auth in the output of ps aux|grep -i xorg (it’s some path in /run/sddm/ in my system)
  • xauth merge ... this file (after changing owner and 755)
  • ~/.Xauthority is existing now.
    Now labwc session’s owner can do xterm & without error.

When I repeat this for an account different than the labwc-session-owner, do xhost +local:... as usual, export DISPLAY=:0 and xterm &, then there is no error message anymore, but no new xterm window either.

BTW: @sfalken: what do you mean “launching labwc” with missing --xwayland precisely? labwc is launched by sddm in my system, I do not run labwc explicitly (excepted labwc -s … nested inside a running labwc for test purposes).

6

most wayland compositors/X11 window managers will use some form of a startup script, that does things like set environment variables, launch a dbus session, sometimes they’ll set the desktop background and other stuff.

I don’t know exactly what labwc uses, but it looks like most of that stuff would probably get set in ~/.config/labwc/autostart or ~/.config/labwc/environment

Although it looks like labwc doesn’t really need that, looking at the source, as you enable/disable xwayland at build time. And the openSUSE package has it enabled in the build.

7

@sfalken: Thank you for your quick responses. I will check that.