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Slackware 10.0 Error Messages—Day 20

© Copyright Darrell Anderson.

There were several error messages in my .xsession-errors file that I finally resolved, although with much grumbling.

The error message of stderr is not a tty where are you? was a challenge. Seems the message results from a variety of causes, but in my particular case the error was caused by a section of bash code in the /etc/profile script. The culprit was:

Long-suffering surfing found the solution of changing that line to:

This needs to be fixed in subsequent Slackware releases because this error message drives a lot people nuts.

Additionally, I have no intention of using mail from the command line, but only from a GUI email client. Thus, I changed the line

to:

Then I edited the /etc/login.defs file not to send a MOTD (I commented out MOTD_FILE) or check for new mail (MAIL_CHECK_ENAB=no). That stopped the “You have mail” messages as well as being told the kernel version whenever I booted into run level 3.

The next set of error messages needing attention was a series of xset problems in .xsession-errors:

Being unfamiliar with the startkde script, I inserted several echo messages to help me discover where in that script these error messages were being generated. The problem is in the way the startkde script validates the global and local KDE font paths. The two global paths are:

The two local paths:

I tried many things, but what finally worked was adding a small pcf.gz file to each directory. In all four of those directories I ran mkfontdir and mkfontscale.

I then edited /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. I commented out the line referencing <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir> because that file path does not exist in Slackware.

I then edited /etc/fonts/local.conf. I added two file paths:

Then I manually ran fc-cache -fv. I don’t know if what I did is the proper solution, but this stopped the nonsense error messages. This seems to be more of a KDE problem and not Slackware. Although I finally stopped those error messages, this was another period of frustration and tail chasing.

Another set of errors that irritated me was whenever I started an X session. I would receive three error messages about X being unable to configure for IPv6:

A common recommended solution I found to stop these errors was to modify the /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers file and add the option

Unfortunately, this solution would not work for me. Then I stumbled upon the idea of passing parameters to the startx script. However the syntax of doing this is (initially) counterintuitive. Instead of typing startx -nolisten tcp, the syntax is startx -- -nolisten tcp. The double dash is for separating X client and server arguments. I then found a recommendation to add that same option to the serverargs variable in the startx script. In the original script the variable is empty. This solution worked, but again, lots of time chasing rabbits.

Unfortunately, this solution is only a half-solution. This serverargs trick works only when starting X from the command line. When starting X from a display manager, I was unable to eliminate those error messages! The error messages continue to appear in the kdm.log although not in the Xorg.0.log. I tried the xdm display manager with the same result. I have yet to discover a remedy. This is irritating!

Additional bothersome error messages were in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Apparently the X server did not like some of the empty font directories despite containing fc-cache-1, fonts.dir, and fonts.scale files. To stop those errors I finally commented those paths out from my font path list in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Finis.

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