I do not have any applications launched by .xinitrc. I did more
experimentation and I think I can now explain the basis for the odd
behaviour. I believe it stems from the fact that X11.app does not
like DISPLAY to be set to :0.
Right, if DISPLAY=0, then X11.app will try launching xterm on that
display. Since it can't (there's not one running), it will try
starting the server itself rather than letting launchd do it.
Here are three similar scripts that react quite differently. It is
assumed that the environment variable DISPLAY is not set prior to
executing the scripts.
In this case no xterms end up being launched. Because DISPLAY set
to :0, the xterm from the script and (presumably) the xterm in
X11.app time out with an error "xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :
0". After that X11 actually starts up and I can launch other
applications normally. The applications inherit DISPLAY=:0.
In this case two xterms are launched. The script xterm probably just
sits because of its display :0 flag, however, because the DISPLAY
environment variable is not set, the following line launches
X11.app and its own xterm. Once X11 is running the initial xterm
also launches and we end up with two xterms.
You're getting the :0 one showing up eventually as a bug. You
*shouldn't* be able to see that xterm, but you do as a bug. You're in
the lucky state where X11.app actually takes DISPLAY=:0 and don't
accidently send the xterm to another user's X11.
This script follows the latest rules and indeed produces the desired
result of launching one xterm. The xterm call goes through launchd/
X11.app as expected. The following osascript brings X11.app to the
front otherwise, when the script is bundled, the xterm would launch
behind the Finder window.
What version of X11 are you using? If X11 is not running, it starts
in the foreground with 2.1.1.
I believe this unusual behaviour could be circumvented if lauchd/
X11.app would accept display settings of the form :0, localhost:0.
Hopefully this will clear up your misunderstanding of $DISPLAY. You
don't use $DISPLAY to tell the server what to do. xinit sets $DISPLAY
to tell clients spawned from it how to connect to the server that it
spawned. In our case, launchd's plist and X11.app act as xinit.
We're moving stuff out of X11.app into xinit for the next release.
DISPLAY=:0
This is shorthand for DISPLAY=unix:0 which means to use the /tmp/.X11-
unix/X0 socket to connect to the server
DISPLAY=localhost:0
This tells the X client to connect to the X server over TCP/IP at
127.0.0.1 port 6000
DISPLAY=/tmp/launchd-xxxxx/:0
This tells the X client to connect to the X server using the /tmp/
launchd-xxxxx/:0 socket
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