[sllug-members]: KDEINIT cannot launch anything!

[Daren Beattie]

Chris Brown wrote:
> Daren,
> 
>   Bummer.
> 
>   Do you have a screensaver set to run? If you do, does it activate
> during this interval? Have you tried turn it off?
> 
>   Is the BIOS set to allow hibernation/sleep?  When you come back to
> your computer does the PC power light give any indication the computer
> might be in sleep mode?
> 
> Chris Brown

I did have a screensaver running after 5 minutes, and also had the 
monitor power down after 30. I disabled those, and also turned off all 
power management options in the BIOS, but the problem persists. Is ACPI 
a common culprit for this sort of thing?


Stuart Jansen wrote:
 > Sounds to me like either
 > a) Your hostname changed. Kill the X server then log back in and
 > everything should be okay.
 > b) You IP address changed. This shouldn't be a problem because X
 > normally uses hostnames, not IPs. Still, the solution is to kill the X
 > server and log back in.
 >
 > Less likely, something is corrupting your .Xauthority file. Or something
 > is setting $XAUTHORITY to an incorrect value.

This is an interesting line of reasoning; I didn't know X was concerned 
with hostnames. I doubt whether that's exactly the problem, since the 
problem has persisted across several restarts of the X server, and also 
a few reboots. KDE will behave normally if I simply log out of my 
session and log back in again (similarly if I have just booted or 
otherwise started the X server), but then after some period of 
inactivity it goes back to being unable to launch any programs.

How can I go about checking the .Xauthority file for corruption? I've 
tried copying it both before and after the problematic behavior is 
exhibited, and then compared both of those copies against each other and 
against the .Xauthority from a fresh boot, using both diff and cmp. Diff 
just says they differ in every case, while cmp goes the extra length to 
say they all differ at byte 34, line 2. I don't know whether that's 
significant, and being binary files, I can't look into them and see 
anything meaningful.

Thanks for the suggestions so far! It's more than I've found anywhere else.