Written by Jamie Tanna
on 
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Apache-2.0
1 mins

Solving /usr/lib/Xorg.wrap: Only console users are allowed to run the X server errors with tmux over SSH

On my Linux machines, I use BSPWM as my window manager, and instead of using a login greeter, I used to log into the TTY on startup and run:

startx

That got annoying, then I added the following to ~/.zlogin:

[[ -z "$DISPLAY" && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx

This allowed me to log into TTY1 and auto-start Xorg, but any other TTY would give me a regular shell.

However, when I SSH onto the machine - usually from my laptop - and connect to a running tmux session, I've fairly often received the following error:

/usr/lib/Xorg.wrap: Only console users are allowed to run the X server

This stops me opening any new windows, and can be super frustrating.

Today, I finally solved it with:

-[[ -z "$DISPLAY" && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx
+[[ -z "$DISPLAY" && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 && -z "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]] && exec startx

Which makes sure that this only affects non-SSH shells, and now no longer triggers the error 👏

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#blogumentation #linux #tmux #ssh.

This post was filed under articles.

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