Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

On Friday, February 14, 2025 5:08 PM, I wrote:

I installed Evince. Calling it brings up not even a GUI, just two error messages:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
Cannot parse arguments: Cannot open display:

That's the sort of thing that happens when you run evince from a
command line not in an Xterminal, or from a terminal running on
a different userid than the one running X.



-dsr-

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On 16/2/25 05:41, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

On Friday, February 14, 2025 5:08 PM, I wrote:

I've completed my U.S. tax forms in the fillable PDFs provided by the
Internal Revenue Service. Now I want to print them ...

In the past, I was happy printing from Acrobat 9, which is still fine for >>> display purposes. But with my new printer (Brother DCP-L2640DW), printing >>> from Acrobat fails. The request gets to the printer, but localhost:631 shows
"Can't detect file type". So I've been happy printing from qpdfview, until >>> now. Now the dollar amounts I entered on the forms look OK in qpdfview's >>> display but print in a very thin font. Any ideas how to fix this?

Xpdf prints show a font that is a little too thick, and xpdf offers none of >>> the printer's options (e.g. double-sided printing). I don't try Evince
(Gnome) or Okular (KDE) because I run the fvwm window manager.

I should have mentioned that I'm running Bookworm. Thanks for the many helpful suggestions. I've tried them all, with the following results:

On Friday, February 14, 2025 5:49 PM, John Hasler wrote:

Evince works for me under FVWM (though I rarely use it).

and on Friday, February 14, 2025 6:41 PM, Bret Busby added:

I use primarily Evince, runnimg on the MATE desktop environement, and,
it seems to work okay.

I suggest that you give it a try.

I have found that an application for one Desktop environment, will
generally work without problems, on another desktop environment, so, KDE
applications will work equally well on MATE, as will gnome and xfce
applications.

I installed Evince. Calling it brings up not even a GUI, just two error messages:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
Cannot parse arguments: Cannot open display:

Are you running (or, trying to run) Evince from the command line,
rather than from the GUI?

I believe (and, it is the way that I run any application on a file) that
the way to run Evince on a file, is, from within the GUI file manager,
right click on the file name, to get the "Open with" in a menu, thence,
to select Evince to open the file.

If you are trying top access the file through some other method, I have
no idea of what you are trying to do, or, why.

..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............

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On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 21:41:27 +0000
"Kleene, Steven (kleenesj)" <kleenesj@UCMAIL.UC.EDU> wrote:

I installed Evince. Calling it brings up not even a GUI, just two
error messages:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
Cannot parse arguments: Cannot open display:

Interesting. I run evince from the command line routinely. e.g.:

evince meet.greet.2025.02.27.pdf &

I get the process number, and that's all.

Are you running evince and X as the same user?

--
Does anybody read signatures any more?

https://charlescurley.com
https://charlescurley.com/blog/

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On Sun, Feb 16, 2025 at 13:53:21 +0000, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

echo $DISPLAY -> :0
xhost -> access control enabled, only authorized clients can connect

echo $XAUTHORITY

The last usually points to ~/.Xauthority.

echo $XAUTHORITY -> ~/.Xauthority

That should not *literally* be ~/.Xauthority of course.

hobbit:~$ declare -p XAUTHORITY
declare -x XAUTHORITY="/home/greg/.Xauthority"

I do not have ~/.xsession-errors.

Well now, *that* is quite strange.

One of the things that the Debian /etc/X11/Xsession script does is this:


ERRFILE=$HOME/.xsession-errors
[...]
# attempt to create an error file; abort if we cannot
if (umask 077 && touch "$ERRFILE") 2> /dev/null && [ -w "$ERRFILE" ] &&
[ ! -L "$ERRFILE" ]; then
chmod 600 "$ERRFILE"
elif ERRFILE=$(mktemp 2> /dev/null); then
if ! ln -sf "$ERRFILE" "${TMPDIR:=/tmp}/xsession-$USER"; then
message "warning: unable to symlink \"$TMPDIR/xsession-$USER\" to" \
"\"$ERRFILE\"; look for session log/errors in" \
"\"$TMPDIR/xsession-$USER\"."
fi
else
errormsg "unable to create X session log/error file; aborting."
fi


So... I wonder if your HOME directory's permissions are screwed up.
What does ls -ld ~ give you? Might as well check all of them while
we're at it: ls -ld / /home ~

Here, I'll start:

hobbit:~$ ls -ld / /home ~
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Feb 9 09:03 //
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Feb 17 2024 /home/
drwxr-xr-x 231 greg greg 65536 Feb 16 11:15 /home/greg/

Also, is there anything that looks like an xsession-$USER file in /tmp?
Or any regular files in /tmp owned by you that have X session output
in them?

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On 17/02/2025 01:23, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

On Sunday, February 16, 2025 8:53 AM, I wrote:

That should not *literally* be ~/.Xauthority of course.

Yes, the output is literally
/u/steve/.Xauthority

A thought just occurred to me. Having your home directory outside of
/home might *conceivably* cause certain things to fail. Programs
that have an AppArmor profile might have been set up to allow full
access to /home but not to /u. Or, programs that are started through
a systemd unit file might be configured with similar access restrictions
which work for users in /home but not users in other locations.

I have no idea whether evince has an AppArmor profile or a systemd
unit file, or whether you're invoking it as a systemd service if the
latter is true. Might be worth looking into.

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On Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 09:27:19 -0600, David Wright wrote:

On Sun 16 Feb 2025 at 00:56:50 (+0000), Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

Yes. I called evince from the command line in an xterm running under fvwm. I also call up the xterm and fvwm from startx (via ~/.xinitrc) when I log in.

Perhaps now moot, I think that's an unusual X start-up. For example,
I can't find any reference to .xinitrc in /etc/X11/, as opposed to
.xsession.

~/.xinitrc is the traditional (read: obsolete) file used by startx.
In Debian, ~/.xsession is preferred for both xdm and startx, in an
attempt to unify the two. I think it's succeeded fairly well, at least
for people who *only* run Debian, and don't share their HOME directory
with some other OS where startx doesn't read ~/.xsession.

If you do share your HOME directory across multiple OSes (and use
startx), you probably want to make ~/.xinitrc a symlink to ~/.xsession,
or vice versa. I'm not aware of any systems where that would cause
problems.


hobbit:~$ grep -r xinitrc /etc/X11
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc:# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc:# global xinitrc file, used by all X sessions started by xinit (startx)


hobbit:~$ less /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
#!/bin/sh

# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
#
# global xinitrc file, used by all X sessions started by xinit (startx)

# invoke global X session script
. /etc/X11/Xsession

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