On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 07:50:36AM -0800, Mike Kupfer wrote: > dmacdoug wrote: > > > sure enough there is no DISPLAY environment variable set. So I set it and > > then the error message became: > > > > Failed to connect to session manager: Failed to connect to the session > > manager: SESSION_MANAGER environment variable not defined > > > > I notice there are several other variables missing which do appear on > > another machine with working xfce system, i.e. one still on stretch > > distribution, such as XDG_MENU_PREFIX=xfce-, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/etc/xdg > > as well as SESSION_MANAGER and several others. > > Huh. How odd. I guess the next step would be to do "pgrep xf" on a > working and non-working system and see what's not running on the > non-working system. (In particular, is xfce4-session running?) Then > make sure the corresponding packages are installed on the non-working > system. > > What display manager is the non-working system using? > > Is /usr/bin/startxfce4 present on the non-working system? > It looks like lightdm is runnung on the system that is not working.
I don't think there is any display manager on the working system. On it, startx runs xinit which starts xfce4. startxfce4 is present on both systems. I did something yesterday and ended up restarting the system on the non-working machine and mow it looks like xfce4 isn't running on that machine. I don't have physical access to it till Sunday afternoon. I'm currently working on it through a remote shell and I'm not sure if or how I can start an X session on the console from a remote shell so I think I'll have to continue this next week. Then I'll compare them with pgrep and see what differences there are. Until then, thanks for your help. To be continued. Don
