2013/04/17

CentOS X .xsession

Further annoyances with CentOS 6. It now uses .xsession as the last resort. The work around is to add the following lines to /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession. Put them just after the line that sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common

if [ -x "$HOME/.xsession" ]; then
    exec -l $SHELL -c "$CK_XINIT_SESSION $SSH_AGENT $HOME/.xsession"
fi

Yes, there's probably a smarter way of doing it. But I don't want to bother tracking it down.

CentOS 6 X problems

First off, 6.4 came out and I didn't notice.

Second off, while setting up my new Laptop (Nicko, an IBM t61) for development, I managed to mess up Xorg. The error messages are

[ 25469.587] [dix] Could not init font path element catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d, removing from list!
[ 25469.587] [dix] Could not init font path element built-ins, removing from list!
[ 25469.587] 
Fatal server error:
[ 25469.587] could not open default font 'fixed'

A quick fix is just yum -y upgrade. But given this would push me to 6.4 (aka a lot of downloading), a smaller fix was required. I found the following got the job done. I strongly suspect the libXfont is all that is required. YMMV

wget ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/6.4/os/x86_64/Packages/xorg-x11-drv-modesetting-0.5.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-drv-modesetting-0.5.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install pixman pixman-devel libXfont -y
sudo yum groupinstall Desktop -y