LXDE Forums

I use Debian testing, i686 and yesterday I ran an update. There were only a few packages updating and about 3 to remove. I always check what updates and removes, and obviously if something is updating I figure its a good thing so I didn't pay much attention to that if I didn't know what exactly the package did. The only package I feel has anything to do with my problem that was removed is lxde-settings-daemon. I cannot reinstall it without other lxde packages being removed.

Anyways, I use Slim and every time I try to login, it says "Failed to execute startup command". Luckily, since LXDE is based on Openbox, I can set the session to Openbox and I can login that way but theres a lot of stuff missing. Then, I open up Terminal and type "startlxde" and my session starts normally. I did some research and found that my ~/.xinitrc file was missing, so I created it and stuck "exec startlxde" in it, which did not fix anything.

How do I get this to log in normally? This is extremely annoying, inconvenient, and confusing. I tried installing GDM just to see if that tells me any more information and it said something along the lines of "your session lasted less than 10 seconds. something might not be installed properly or you may have run out of disk space" but obviously that doesn't help because i don't know what isn't installed properly and I have plenty of disk space left over.

The critical step is what does /etc/slim.conf have to say about login_cmd=

That is where you would put startlxde in order for that to be started. Mine says bash -l -c "/usr/bin/lxsession -s LXDE" but I don't run all the things others do, so I don't use startlxde.
The -l is important to get a login shell so your environment variables like locale and path will be correct.

I don't believe .xinitrc has any role in starting what needs to be started, so it would be normal for it to be missing.

The functions of lxde-settings-daemon were folded into lxsession, so it would be normal for it to be missing if you are running a sufficiently recent lxsession.

hmm interesting, you are very informative and I really appreciate your post. Currently my slim.conf says:
I'm a tiny bit confused as to what you said should be put in there and I'd rather not take a risk and screw it up even more, so should the command become:
or would simply doing:
work ok?

exec /bin/bash --login -c "/usr/bin/startlxde" should do it. You need the bash and the -l or --login in the way to get your locale and path set.

http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Debian has the Debian setup guide. If you wanted multiple sessions, such as the ability to go to Openbox from Slim, you'll have to reintroduce something like the .xinitrc script that is sensitive to %session that is discussed there and run that instead. They don't seem to have an example of .xinitrc that does this, maybe someone else can post theirs.

Well now I can't even log into openbox anymore. I purged slim and reinstalled it to reverse the issues (I'm not sure how many lingering files there are so I found purging the easiest method). I tried booting up without slim and just tried startx and this is what I got:
My xorg.conf is not the problem, because theres nothing in it and never has been. What I don't understand, though, is X still starts with GDM or SLiM but it won't when I manually tell it to. I feel this has something to do with my problem but I can't figure out what. I can't really afford to just reinstall this setup, I shouldn't have to reinstall everything because of someone else's mistake with package updates.

You are correct. You shouldn't have to reinstall. But it might be the easiest way to get from where you are to a working system.

You are well beyond anything LXDE related. At this point I'd suggest that you take your problem to your distro for help. Hopefully the understanding you have gained of how Slim starts things will be of help to you in the future.

Well see this is whats weird to me: why am I using a graphical interface right now but startx doesn't work? This is all so confusing to me because everything is inconsistent, just like me being able to manually start lxde but not automatically.

Considering that LXDE isn't anywhere near as popular as some of the other DEs, I feel as though reinstalling Debian would just give me the same results I've encountered now because they might not have paid attention to something really important.

Do you think purging all of LXDE and reinstalling it would help? I just don't see how reinstalling the whole OS is going to fix anything because I didn't change anything, so if I were to reinstall Debian and update everything I'd probably encounter the same issue, I could be wrong though. I'm trying to avoid reinstalling because it took a long time to set up everything and I have to download Debian again.

i just purged lxde and openbox and its still not working. i think i might as well just do a fresh new install. i don't know what happened but i sure hope this doesn't happen again. i appreciate the effort put into helping me.

i wont be reinstalling until the weekend. if anyone has any ideas of what i could do until then, please let me know

dont rush it...
i had a similar problem and i think it has to do with the dissapearance of lxde-settings-daemon and the implementation of the new lxsessions for squeeze...
with gdm at the login i had 2 errors..one scrambled my Desktop appearance and said something like the icon theme GTK+ wasn't established correctly.
and a second one that prayed your session lasted less than 10 seconds (and its not a space problem since root partition still has 3.5 GB...)...if you accepted you were thrown at the login screen again, but by ignoring it i can work almost as before...
i think that if we wait, a new update will fix the trouble..but if someone finds out before it would be greatly appreciated...(and i dont think it is a distro thing...by the way i use debian squeze.)

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=575150
...like this says you can try to update to the unstable packages of LXDE..it might solve the problem..
dont do another install

worked for me