As of xorg-x11-xinit-1.3.2-7.fc17 (which I got via "yum update" on Friday 19-Oct-2012), typing "startx" at the console (i.e. when booting the machine with run-level 3) prints "Error getting tty num" and exits. "telinit 5" works fine. I was able to fix the problem by rebuilding the xorg-x11-xinit package from source (i.e. "yumdownloader --source xorg-x11-xinit") and modifying line 16 of xorg-x11-xinit-1.3.2-systemd-logind.patch . Before, it read: +if [ x"$tty_num" != x ]; then In my fixed version, it reads: +if [ x"$tty_num" == x ]; then The commit that led to this problem is described at http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/scm-commits/2012-October/872512.html .
Soooo...is anyone going to apply this fix? I just upgraded a computer from FC16 to FC17 and noticed that the old, bugged version was still in the yum repos.
Created attachment 750754 [details] Patch for FC18 Here's the patch for FC18. So...is anyone ever going to apply this _extremely simple_ bug fix...? Or am I just spamming the bug queue?
So, I think folks in #fedora-devel conclude unanimously the proposed fix here is incorrect. The code: tty_num=$(tty | grep -oE '[0-9]+$') ... if [ x"$tty_num" != x ]; then # Specify TTY number directly to avoid recognizing startx session as # inactive: RHBZ#820675 serverargs=${serverargs}" vt"${tty_num} else echo "Error getting tty num" exit 1 fi The real problem is hitting the "Error getting tty num" case at all. We need to know why/how the 'tty' call is ending up empty for you.
Here's the key difference we just found: "(tty>blah.txt)&" works "(tty>blah.txt&)" doesn't That seems like an odd inconsistency in the way bash handles background processes. So, if anything, it's a bash issue, not an xorg-x11-xinit issue. I'll shut up now. :-)