[gentoo-user] Xt error: Can't open display: :1

[David Sveningsson]

Hi, for years I've been running a multiple monitor setup based on two
screens, on a few different machines.

Recently, I can not say exactly when but after system upgrades, I am
unable to open windows on the secondary monitor.

At first I thought this was related to ati-drivers as they cause lots of
issues anyway but today I got the same problem with another machine
running nvidia-drivers.

In the console (running X) all I see is:

xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :1

However, by starting a terminal at :0 and address the other monitor as
:0.1 (which is the correct name) I can start a terminal and from there
start everything. But that is quite inconvenient.

I don't really know how to debug this as there is so many different
factors involved, so got any clue on how to solve this? In both cases I
upgraded the system in one go, so I cant pinpoint a specific version of
any package without downgrading one at a time.

Xorg is setup as following:
2 monitors, 2 cards (multihead), 2 screens and serverlayout setting the
layout of the monitors.

As window manager I am using fluxbox.

# emerge -pvq fluxbox xorg-x11 xorg-server nvidia-drivers

[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.9.2.901 USE="ipv6 nptl udev xorg
-dmx -doc -kdrive -minimal -static-libs -tslib"
[ebuild R ] x11-wm/fluxbox-1.1.1-r2 USE="imlib nls slit toolbar
truetype -gnome -newmousefocus -vim-syntax -xinerama"
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-x11-7.4-r1
[ebuild R ] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-260.19.21 USE="(multilib)
-acpi -custom-cflags -gtk"

So, any ideas?

[David Sveningsson]

Post by David Sveningsson
Hi, for years I've been running a multiple monitor setup based on two
screens, on a few different machines.
Recently, I can not say exactly when but after system upgrades, I am
unable to open windows on the secondary monitor.
At first I thought this was related to ati-drivers as they cause lots of
issues anyway but today I got the same problem with another machine
running nvidia-drivers.
xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :1
However, by starting a terminal at :0 and address the other monitor as
:0.1 (which is the correct name) I can start a terminal and from there
start everything. But that is quite inconvenient.
I don't really know how to debug this as there is so many different
factors involved, so got any clue on how to solve this? In both cases I
upgraded the system in one go, so I cant pinpoint a specific version of
any package without downgrading one at a time.
2 monitors, 2 cards (multihead), 2 screens and serverlayout setting the
layout of the monitors.
As window manager I am using fluxbox.
# emerge -pvq fluxbox xorg-x11 xorg-server nvidia-drivers
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.9.2.901 USE="ipv6 nptl udev xorg -dmx
-doc -kdrive -minimal -static-libs -tslib"
[ebuild R ] x11-wm/fluxbox-1.1.1-r2 USE="imlib nls slit toolbar truetype
-gnome -newmousefocus -vim-syntax -xinerama"
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-x11-7.4-r1
[ebuild R ] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-260.19.21 USE="(multilib) -acpi
-custom-cflags -gtk"
So, any ideas?

To further investigate the problem I used genlop and a small
pythonscript to mask all packages recently updated.

I found that downgrading from x11-libs/libX11-1.4.0 to
x11-libs/libX11-1.3.6 resolves the issue.

Still no idea why it stops working thought.