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DISPLAY and those random system crashes



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Remember those random crashes I was getting, and it seemed to be the
swap partition?  Well, it's not - I'm still getting them.  The intent,
eventually, is to just rebuild the machine completely, but that will
have to wait until my wife is more fully employed.

That said, though, I've been seeing something odd that may possibly be
related.  I run a VNC server on this machine and connect in remotely
(DISPLAY=localhost:20.0).  The last few times the machine crashed, the
VNC session was running 4 applications: 2 xterms, emacs, and knetwalk.
When restarting the machine and logging in again, I find that the 4
applications that were previously running on display 20 in the VNC
session are now being started in the local display on my desktop itself
(0.0).  This seems... strange.

I kill those, no problem.  But now, trying to start any application
inside the VNC session I get something similar to the following:

   $ xterm &
   $ No protocol specified

   (terminal:6289) Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: localhost:20.0

for xterm.  For emacs I see:

   $ emacs &
   No protocol specified
   Display localhost:20.0 unavailable, simulating -nw

So there seems to be some sort of display confusion.  Interestingly,
though, if I ssh into this machine and run xterm or emacs from there it
starts up properly.  Since I'm not there at the moment, I can't see if
trying to start these applications on display 20.0 is doing anything to
the console.

So what am I missing?  Most of the posts I can retrieve via Google focus
on things like the hosts file (looks fine), making sure DISPLAY is set
with "localhost" and not just ":20.0" and the like.  And yet this was
working yesterday, before the most recent round of crashes last night.
Obviously something changed in the interim.

Thanks for your patience,
 -Don
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