From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.19-6.2.7smp i686; Nav) Description of problem: If I attempt to "startx" on a 7.2 install the X server starts but only displays a grey background (only X is running no gome-session et al). If I change /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to source ('.') /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients rather than exec Xclients everything works. That is gnome-session starts, sawfish is loaded, etc. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. startx 2. watch grey screen 3. ctrl-alt-backspace Actual Results: grey screen of core X server is displayed, meaning Xclients is never exec'd this has been verified with various echo debugging when starting X Expected Results: /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients should be run and then gnome-session should be started along with sawfish and the rest of the gnome desktop. Additional info: I'm at a loss as to why sourcing /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients fixes the problem whereas exec of Xclients never actually happens... no X related rpms or files are being modified. If I run Xconfigurator and test the setup I specified (while maintaining exec /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients in xinitrc) the test display starts and works perfectly fine with sawfish, gnome panel, etc running. After I finish Xconfigurator and type startx the grey X server just sits there; that is until I ctrl-alt-backspace out of X and change line 72 of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to: . /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients Any suggestions?
Created attachment 49486 [details] patch to source Xclients instead of exec
Are you using bash as your login shell, or tcsh or some other shell?
I am using bash as the login shell. btw, Xclients has permissions 755 and has #!/bin/bash
This bug was reported a long time ago, however I remember investigating it when I added my initial comment above. At that time, I was not able to reproduce the problem. I use startx almost exclusively to start up the X server on all my systems, and I have never encountered this problem on any OS release. The code in xinitrc simply exec's the /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients script, which as you've indicated above is executable. I'm going to assume that this was a configuration or installation quirk on your system, as no other user has reported this to us as a bug, and many people use 'startx' to start the X server, so the problem must have been isolated to that specific system. Setting bug state to "WORKSFORME", as this is unreproduceable, and nobody else seems to have this problem on other systems.