How can I unlock /tmp/.tX0-lock

Question

I updated to 16.04 from 14.04.3. Since then I have experienced an increasingly unstable OS.

When I boot up the process gives me a terminal. When I use startx, I get the following error:

Fatal Server Error: Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock. Go to X.org Foundation for help

No one is home at X.org. The pile of X System docs I have reviewed describe processes that appear to happen after whatever file is locked.

A later error message in the process says:

xinit: giving up xinit; unable to connect to X server;Connection refused. xinit: server error
Xauth: error in locking authority file /home/robert/.Xauthority

How do I fix this, or where do I look to find out how to?

Solution

error in locking authority file /home/robert/.Xauthority

means that that file does not have the correct permissions.

Do a ls -l /home/robert/.Xauthority and verify it looks like this up the the 2nd "robert":

-rw------- 1 robert robert 57 sep  4 08:02 .Xauthority

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You can set user and group with ...

sudo chown $USER:$USER /home/robert/.Xauthority

And the permissions with ...

sudo chmod 600 /home/robert/.Xauthority

It is possible that there is an underlying problem though and that this is just a symptom.

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Fatal Server Error: sCould not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock. Go to X.org Foundation for help

can have a lot of reasons. It could be due to the other error above so when you fix that and this goes away fine. But it can also indicate a faulty hard disk, or a wrongly mounted /tmp.

Do have a look at Ubuntu boots into terminal and XServer Error could not create lock file

Comments

[user278701]

By the way, the listing came back