On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 02:58:56PM +0100, Gavan Fantom wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> 
> >I have no idea what's going on here.  Can anyone explain it?  It would
> >be nice to be able to run a web browser!
> 
> You don't run vnc or anything else that could write to .Xauthority, do 
> you?

No!  A totally plain-vanilla X installation so bare and old-school
that generally I only have twm and a window manager running, in fact.

Rebooting the machine seemed to fix the problem, but it's been
reported by others, and I think we should figure out its root cause
if we can.

Restarting the X server did *not* fix the problem, because the X server,
in fact, would not restart!  I killed and restarted xdm, in fact, and it
was unable to restart the X server until I rebooted the machine.

Something must be messed up with X authorization somehow such that some
kind of _global_ state can end up so wrong that either of these symptoms
could happen.  I just can't think what that state could be.

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud