Leopard, Xquartz 2.1.5 and Spawning Problems
Arguably belatedly, I made the transition from Tiger to Leopard on my various machines yesterday. In general, the transition seemed to go smoothly; however, some bumps have been encountered with X11 (Xquartz 2.1.5 - (xorg-server 1.3.0-apple22) (2.1.5)). In particular, either interactively launching a command (e.g. xeyes) from Terminal.app or launching X11.app directly from the Finder, resulted in the popular: 3/18/09 5:12:07 PM com.apple.launchd[178] (org.x.startx) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds error. After reading this list and consulting Google, I concluded that DISPLAY was not the problem and selectively began adding/removing dot (e.g. .profile, etc.) files from my home directory. I eventually narrowed it down to my .profile. Within that file, I further narrowed it down to a few lines: if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then exit 0 fi If I have a .profile with these lines and only these lines, X11 will never start. If I simply change the above to: if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then echo "Non-interactive" fi Then X starts normally and whatever command that needed to use the display runs and realizes its windows, etc. I've been using this .profile for nearly two decades on all manner of systems including Sun OS, Solaris, Irix, Cygwin, HP/UX, Darwin, Linux, etc. and have never had a problem with the above logic. The whole script amounts to: # Set umask # Add some paths to PATH # Exit if non-interactive # Interactive setup What is it about falling off the end of the profile that is OK (should amount to exit $?) whereas explicitly calling exit 0 causes X11 to choke in attempting to launch? Thanks, Grant
I think X11's startup process involves a non-interactive bash login shell, which you're terminating before it has a chance to run anything. On Mar 18, 2009, at 5:32 PM, Grant Erickson wrote:
Arguably belatedly, I made the transition from Tiger to Leopard on my various machines yesterday.
In general, the transition seemed to go smoothly; however, some bumps have been encountered with X11 (Xquartz 2.1.5 - (xorg-server 1.3.0-apple22) (2.1.5)).
In particular, either interactively launching a command (e.g. xeyes) from Terminal.app or launching X11.app directly from the Finder, resulted in the popular:
3/18/09 5:12:07 PM com.apple.launchd[178] (org.x.startx) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
error. After reading this list and consulting Google, I concluded that DISPLAY was not the problem and selectively began adding/removing dot (e.g. .profile, etc.) files from my home directory.
I eventually narrowed it down to my .profile. Within that file, I further narrowed it down to a few lines:
if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then exit 0 fi
If I have a .profile with these lines and only these lines, X11 will never start. If I simply change the above to:
if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then echo "Non-interactive" fi
Then X starts normally and whatever command that needed to use the display runs and realizes its windows, etc. I've been using this .profile for nearly two decades on all manner of systems including Sun OS, Solaris, Irix, Cygwin, HP/UX, Darwin, Linux, etc. and have never had a problem with the above logic. The whole script amounts to:
# Set umask
# Add some paths to PATH
# Exit if non-interactive
# Interactive setup
What is it about falling off the end of the profile that is OK (should amount to exit $?) whereas explicitly calling exit 0 causes X11 to choke in attempting to launch?
On Mar 18, 2009, at 17:32, Grant Erickson wrote:
Then X starts normally and whatever command that needed to use the display runs and realizes its windows, etc. I've been using this .profile for nearly two decades on all manner of systems including Sun OS, Solaris, Irix, Cygwin, HP/UX, Darwin, Linux, etc. and have never had a problem with the above logic. The whole script amounts to:
# Set umask
# Add some paths to PATH
# Exit if non-interactive
# Interactive setup
Your .profile is SOURCED, so you putting 'exit 0' causes the non- interactive shell to exit. Change this to use the form: # set umask # set path # if interactive # interactive setio # fi
What is it about falling off the end of the profile that is OK (should amount to exit $?) whereas explicitly calling exit 0 causes X11 to choke in attempting to launch?
If you exit, you exit. launchd doesn't see X11 start (because you exited), so it tries again (and you exit again). "falling off the end of the profile" is not the same as exit $?
On 3/18/09 6:39 PM, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
What is it about falling off the end of the profile that is OK (should amount to exit $?) whereas explicitly calling exit 0 causes X11 to choke in attempting to launch?
If you exit, you exit. launchd doesn't see X11 start (because you exited), so it tries again (and you exit again).
"falling off the end of the profile" is not the same as exit $?
My mental model of exit with respect to sourced scripts was that it was akin to "falling off the end"; however, clearly that was and is wrong. Thanks for the (re-)education.
participants (3)
-
Grant Erickson
-
Jeremy Huddleston
-
William Mortensen