[UNSOLVED] XFCE with systemd

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 10:46 am Post subject: [UNSOLVED] XFCE with systemd

Hallo people.
I'm a beginner with Gentoo (less than a week). I have achieved to install Gentoo on a laptop.
Due to the slow performance first I only installed the [25] default/linux/amd64/17.0/systemd (stable) * profile.
Now I wanted to install the XFCE4 desktop.
For this I installed

guitou · Guru Joined: 02 Oct 2003 Posts: 534 Location: France

Hello.

Your X log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) might be a good starting point to help diagnose the issue.

++
Gi)

dermatty · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2018 Posts: 1

use only standard user for startx, not root! with root, startx will fail!

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 12:10 pm Post subject:

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 12:18 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 2:17 pm Post subject:

Are you using "startx xfce4" or "startxfce4" ... the latter should work. The former, I'm not quite so sure...

Tu use startx you may need to set XSESSION=xfce4 or something like that ...
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 6:53 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2018 10:11 pm Post subject:

You should be running

"startxfce4"

(One word, NO spaces, ONE x)

I believe running

"XSESSION=xfce4 startx"

should also work -- but I did not try it and not sure.
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The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

And in any case you should absolutely NOT be doing it as root.

Running X as root is very dangerous as GUI apps are not secured so the entire system is vulnerable. Besides that, all the GUI tools are designed to be run as a user and expect it. This means that they will fail in unexpected ways when run as root.

The 3 screens you got are the default X environment, twm I believe, that gets bundled with xorg.
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Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 9:23 am Post subject: Re: XFCE with systemd

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 11:40 am Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 1:34 pm Post subject:

Not sure when the devs will chime in but they'll suggest not to hack your .xinitrc unless you really know what you're doing - as it will muck up with the Gentoo scripting, mainly to set up XDG stuff.

Do so at your own risk (though startxfce4 will also set up XDG stuff for you.)
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 7:48 pm Post subject: Re: XFCE with systemd

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:40 pm Post subject:

Did you install xfce4-meta or how did you install xfce4?

/usr/bin/startxfce4 is part of xfce-base/xfce4-session which should have been picked up by xfce4-meta . You can try

equery list xfce4-session

to see if you have it installed. equery is part of app-portage/gentoolkit if you don't have it installed.
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 1:19 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 1:50 pm Post subject:

Well, need to expect compilation time!

I still run Gentoo-xfce4 on an Atom box (with 2GB RAM) so I feel your pain... Trying to use my quad core machines as much as possible but the Atom is still stuck compiling on its own frequently.
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 1:58 pm Post subject:

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 11:02 am Post subject:

Hallo friends.
After I was busy to learn about distcc usage in combination with emerge / compiling / make, I tried to install

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:17 pm Post subject:

As systemd is an explicit choice for Gentoo, if you did not install systemd, likely you do not have it. Most Gentooers are systemd refugees by choice as they want to stay far away from this contraption. That is not to say there are a good number of them using it as well (me included, I have a mixture of systemd and openrc boxes.)

I think a quick way to tell: Run

linuxfluesterer · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 5:41 pm Post subject:

On my 'strong' computer, I have a Sabayon OS, a Gentoo based binary operating system.
It is using systemd. That is the reason, why I chose systemd for Gentoo installation profile.
But it made problems then to install a simple desktop, XFCE

Because Plasma contains many (sub) packages, I will not install it before I will have made more experiences with Gentoo.

Ok, it's a good idea to check an installation with the systemctl -a command.
I also know, that there is a systemd component, which can be installed with emerge

-Linuxfluesterer

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 7:22 pm Post subject:

I'm more worried about people who run

# emerge systemd

and then they say they're running systemd... no they are not. A kernel command line needs to be changed to specify systemd as init.

Honestly I've found xfce runs perfectly fine under systemd. Haven't noticed any glitches whatsoever. Granted most of my systemd boxes have gnome3 installed as well, perhaps having gnome3 gets more of the dep issues cleared away.

---

BTW, my poor old Atom box (Netbook, distcc disabled because I don't have any helpers ready for it, single core/HT, 2GB RAM) is now 56 hours into a world update (OpenRC/XFCE4). It still has 70 packages to go.
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2018 11:28 am Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:29 am Post subject:

Please post which package failed and some context.

Again all my systemd boxes have gnome3 installed and thus had the gnome3/systemd profile set. But it should not be relevant - my xfce/openrc boxes merged fine with a plain desktop profile....
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linuxfluesterer · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:09 am Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:16 pm Post subject:

It takes a lot to make a Gentoo box unrecoverable, but more information is needed to help debug.
Screenshots will be necessary, or post lines from build.log ... The location of build.log should be specified in the merge failure output. Post the exact location of the file too, since that path contains the exact package that's being built and have trouble.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
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