xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: :0.0

David Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org
Tue Jan 21 23:20:09 UTC 2014


I noticed something a bit odd today:  I tend to connect to everything
from my laptop, which has historically Just Worked.

Today, around mid-day, I tried starting an xterm... and (apparently)
nothing happened.

So I tried issuing "xterm &" from an existing xterm, and saw:

d130(9.2-S)[13] Maximum number of clients reachedxterm: Xt error: Can't open display: :0.0


Well... that's kinda ... rude....  (I subsequently found similar
messages in ~/.xsession-errors.)

Some salient information about the environment:

The machine is running:

FreeBSD g1-251.catwhisker.org 9.2-STABLE FreeBSD 9.2-STABLE #649  r260981M/260982:902506: Tue Jan 21 04:53:17 PST 2014     root at g1-251.catwhisker.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CANARY  i386

today.  (I generally update it daily; see
<http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/history/laptop_i386_9.txt> for
a history of updates to the machine since last May;
<http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/history/> has an explanation
of what I've done to the version string output by uname and "sysctl
kern.version".)

As you might gather from the above, I use xdm.

I haven't yet had the courage to try the "new X.org" yet; I'm using
xorg-7.7.

I see by my records that I updated xterm from xterm-300 to xterm-301
yesterday morning.  I didn't exercise the machine as much then as
I am doing today -- yesterday was a work holiday; I'm at work today.

While xorg-7.7 has dependencies of dbus & hal, I don't run either of
those (as I had some bad experiences with hal apparently going into
100% CPU loops); rather, I added the stanza:


Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection


to xorg.conf some years ago, and never looked back.

I'm using nvidia-driver, and have been for about as long as I've
had this laptop (which is almost 4 years now).

Is this result ... expected now?  Is there some configuration-thing
I can/should change to avoid running into whatever limit this is?
Is there more information I can/should provide?

Thanks in advance; please include me in the recipient list of
messages on this topic, as I'm not subscribed to x11 at .  (I've set
Reply-To in an attempt to make this less inconvenient.)

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Taliban: Evil cowards with guns afraid of truth from a 14-year old girl.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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