[Xquartz-dev] Leopard, Xquartz 2.1.5 and Spawning Problems

[William Mortensen]

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?