Hi Philippe, On Thu Jun 25, 2026 at 1:53 AM EDT, Philippe Delavalade wrote: > Hi. > > Being blind I don't use GUI but from time to time I want to show something > on the screen to a sighted person. > > For instance, I ran on my old distro 'xinit xpdf file.pdf' ; Things worked > fine because the installer had installed everything for GUI.
To my understanding, the idiomatic way of running xinit is with the 'startx' command, though I can't speak to their exact differences offhand. I believe startx also lets you specify a single client to open, as in your example. > > With arch, I tried to instal some xorg packages but... I get a lot of > warnings and errors but don't understand how to solve the problems. For the use-case you're describing, I would imagine that the 'xorg-server' and 'xorg-xinit' packages (plus dependencies) are all you need to install up front. > Fatal server error: > [ 639.934] (EE) parse_vt_settings: Cannot open /dev/tty0 (Permission denied) > [ 639.934] (EE) > [ 639.934] (EE) > Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support > at http://wiki.x.org > for help. See this forum post which looks like it describes your exact problem, and in which the switch to running 'startx' was the solution. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=265523
