CDE Unable to initialize or connect to the Desktop

[John Aguina_1]

When trying to login we are seeing the following message.

Unable to initialize or connect to the Desktop messaging system.

Any idea what is causing this ? I am told that everything worked fine last Friday.

Thanks
John

[Steven E. Protter]

Big question to answer is WHAT CHANGED.

Something changed somewhere.

The most common cause of these issues is the DISPLAY variable. Make sure its valid and if you are connecting from a PC contains the IP address of the PC, not some temporary hostname that your windows environment assigns.

example

DISPLAY=192.168.0.2:0.0
export DISPLAY

SEP

[Pete Randall]

Did anything change in regard to hostname resolution? IP address change? Changes to the DNS server?

What release of the OS? There was a glitch in 10.20/11.0 that has since been fixed. Offhand, I can't seem to recall the workaround, but I'll do some searching.


Pete

[John Aguina_1]

Nothing has changed on the 10.20 server so we are checking with our DNS folks.

Thanks again.
John

[Pete Randall]

John,

I mention hostname resolution issues because that's generally the culprit. Here's some other threads dealing with this issue:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x72b479bffde7d4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x4d22f608743fd711abdc0090277a778c,00.html
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x35575c7609e9d61190050090279cd0f9,00.html
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x809184534efbd5118ff40090279cd0f9,00.html

You might want to try switching /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at hosts first:

hosts: files[NOTFOUND=continue UNAVAIL=continue] dns [NOTFOUND=continue UNAVAIL=continue TRYAGAIN=return] nis

and make sure that the hostname/IP are correct in /etc/hosts.


Pete

[Stuart Powell]

John,

Something else to keep in mind is the command /usr/bin/X11/xhost. Look at the man page. However, if CDE use to work on the desktop then something has changed.

Stuart

[Steve Steel]

Hi

Ar there tooltalk messages in syslog

Look at /usr/contrib/bin/X11/dr_dt nd fix any faults.

Steve Steel

[Jack C. Mahaffey]

Look and see if anybody made changes to /etc/profile

jack

[Zigor Buruaga]

Hi,

Check if the user has permissions to write the .Xauthority file.
I have a similar problem when users with the same HOME directory tried to login with X- windows.
Only an idea.

Kind regards,
Zigor