Sorry if this is off topic, but I'm having a very weird problem with the name "localhost" and I wonder if perhaps any of you folks could help me to sort it out.
Basically, once I start up X and fvwm, I see that all of my xterm windows are automagically inheriting the following environment variable and the value shown: DISPLAY localhost:0.0 For reasons I'm none too clear on, this worked just fine for me earlier, but I diddled a few things on this system since then and now I seem to have broken it somehow. Now, when I try to start up *any* browser (and probably also any X application) I get rather cryptic failure messages. The one from teh Opera browser is clear enough. It says it cannot connect to the X server on startup. I futzed around trying to fix this problem for awhile and I managed to discover that if I manually set DISPLAY instead to just :0.0 then suddenly all my X applications start to work again. Here is the output from the command "getent hosts localhost" on the system in question: ::1 localhost 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.tristatelogic.com What am I doing wrong? Why doesn't the default value of localhost:0.0 for DISPLAY work just as well as :0.0 ?