Hello. In the process of following internet advice I do not understand, I deleted .Xauthority from my home directory. Part of my reason for doing this was that everyone writes that it’s easy to regenerate by logging out and logging in again… but that’s not working. Nor are the other measures I read and try, but do not understand.
As sometimes happens, this is a story of taking a problem and making it worse. .Xauthority was deleted in the process of trying to troubleshoot a custom systemd service which wasn’t properly running certain commands. Well, now that script is returning /usr/bin/xsetroot: unable to open display ':0', and I can only assume that’s from a lack of .Xauthority file. Nothing else in the systems seems to have broken, but I can’t continue stepping forward with my custom service until I’ve remedied this one-step-back.
I wish that I could just restore a Timeshift save point, but, since there file in question is in the home directory, that’s not possible.
If so, ~/.Xauthority isn’t used any more. That’s why it’s not recreated when you delete it. Instead of ~/.Xauthority, it’s now /tmp/xauth_xxxxx (the xxxxx will be a unique identifier).
This commit moves Xauthority handling over to libXau…However, we lose the ability to merge the new cookie into an existing Xauthority file, so support for using a non-temporary file is dropped.
…just like @Stagger_Lee suggests. Yes, I am using Plasma. Let me check what happens when I change the path that my WIP service uses to look for the Xauthority thing and report back.
