On Tue, Nov 03, 2026 at 06:34:02 -0500, Dan Ritter wrote: > Donald MacDougall wrote: > > All I did after typing 'startx' (as me, not root) resulting in the black > > screen was press ^Alt and the first 6 function keys none of which did > > anything at all followed by Fn Alt and the function keys which also had no > > effect, then I quick tapped the power key. That caused a normal shutdown > > with a rapid scrolling up the screen of the normal shutdown messages and > > then the computer powered off.
If you never use lightdm to login, then I recommend you purge it. Having it present but inactive may be causing confusion. If you want to start using it later, you can just install it then. > "startx" starts X11. > > Somewhere in the log file that you didn't copy will be the clue > about what caused X11 to stop. To be clear, the log files in question would be: ~/.xsession-errors # for the X11 client applications ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log # for the X11 server, normally or /var/log/Xorg.0.log # for the X11 server, legacy mode > You should read the man pages for "startx" and "xinit". I mean... yeah, in theory? Probably won't help much immediately. > You say that you do not have a .xinitrc in your home directory. > Try creating it with this line in it as the only content: > > xfce4-session > > Then run startx and tell us what happens. In Debian specifically, ~/.xsession is preferred over ~/.xinitrc because the former is used by both startx *and* the various display managers. When I asked my web browser's search agent for the magic command to start XFCE, the results I got said startxfce4 instead of xfce4-session, so I have no idea which one's right. Maybe both. Maybe neither. I don't know. The Arch Linux wiki <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xfce> says to use startxfce4 and they're usually a good source. Before committing one of them to the file system, you should be able to test each one in turn: startx startxfce4 startx xfce4-session Of course, that assumes you have a working X server, which at this point is still in question. If you *just* want to test the X server, what I would do is: apt-get install xterm startx xterm That should give you a GUI display with a moving mouse cursor, and a single 80x24 terminal window in the upper left corner. Moving the cursor into the terminal window should allow you to type in it. Moving the cursor out of the window should remove focus, and typing will no longer do anything. The cursor within the terminal window should change from solid to hollow depending on where the focus is. Run the "exit" command in the window to terminate the session. If that doesn't work, then the X server is malfunctioning, and you'll need to look at the X server logs (paths shown above) to find out why. (Either that, or xterm is malfunctioning, which would be unlikely.) Oh, and just for good measure, I would run "df -h" on this system and make sure none of the file systems are full.
