I'm having a problem logging into xfce under Arch Linux.
Problem:
After logging in (with Slim like I usually do), I get this error message:
Unable to load a failsafe session Unable to determine failsafe session name. Possible causes xconfd isn't running (D-Bus setup problem); environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set incorrectly (must include "/etc") or xfce4-session is installed incorrectly. Fixes that did NOT work:
I found these fixes on Google, but none of them worked for me.
1. Make sure $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set correctly:
export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/etc/xdg 2. Make sure everything in my home directory has correct permissions:
sudo chown -R $USER $HOME 3. Change permissions of /etc/xdg:
(I later realized that this must be an old fix because Arch recommends 755 permissions for /etc/xdg, NOT 644)
sudo chmod 644 /etc/xdg 4. Try to start an xfce session manually:
(because this did not work, I know that the problem is with xfce and not SLIM)
startxfce4 5. Total reinstall of all xfce apps:
yaourt -Sa $(yaourt -Qsq xfce) 6. Remove xfce config and then reinstall everything (in order to make sure that xfce settings are reset to default)
mv ~/.config/xfce ~/.config/xfce.bak yaourt -Sa $(yaourt -Qsq xfce) 7. Deleting session cache:
rm -r ~/.cache/sessions/ I'd list the output of yaourt -Qsq xfce if I could, but I'd need to login to my computer in order to copy and paste it.
3 Answers
The way work for me is to replace exec startxfce 4 by dbus-launch xfce4-session
The xstartup file looks like the following:
#!/bin/sh unset SESSION_MANAGER unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS dbus-launch xfce4-session Don't use slim. It's outdated and doesn't support logind and other systemd stuff on arch. Use lightdm with the gtk greeter instead (official Xfce-IRC-help-channel recommendation).
Alsoxfce4-session-develis outdated in favor forxfce4-sessionsince the 4.12 release. I will updatexfce4-session-develas soon as a >4.12 development version is released.
I found out that the problem was with xfce4-session-devel. The latest update doesn't work on my system. Installing the stable xfce4-session package would have been the correct fix:
sudo pacman -S xfce4-session 
