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Created by Jakob Hauser@Jakko

Starting session might fail without package "procps"

Specific example:

On distribution postmarketOS I installed package calls (a phone application). Two reboots later, the Xfce4 session fails to start and returns to the display manager.

What happens:

postmarketOS is based on distribution Alpine Linux [1], which is build around musl libc and busybox. On installation of calls, it is added to autostart. After the first reboot, calls starts a daemon. By default, at the Xfce4 shutdown/reboot dialog the option "Save session for future logins" is set. Saving the restart command for running programs is done by ps -p %u -o args= [2]. Busybox doesn't have the option "-p" in its ps command [3]. Therefore the line RestartCommand (and line Program) remains empty in file ~/.config/sessions/xfce4-session-HOSTNAME:0. When rebooting a second time, this empty line leads to xfce4-session failing to start.

Snippet from file ~/.config/sessions/xfce4-session-hostname:0:

Client6_ClientId=org.gnome.Calls
Client6_Hostname=hostname
Client6_RestartCommand=
Client6_DesktopFile=/usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Calls.desktop
Client6_Program=

Workaround:

I will set up a merge request at Alpine Linux to set package "procps" as a dependency of xfce4-session. This package contains the full-featured ps command [4].

Points I want to raise:

  • Maybe there are other distros running on busybox or other reasons why xfce4-session should run reliably without package "procps".
  • Even if package "procps" isn't installed and a RestartCommand line remains empty, this shouldn't lead to xfce4-session failing to start. I would expect just the program not starting. This would confuse the user as well but would be less severe.

OS/software:

  • Distribution: postmarketOS (based on Alpine Linux)
  • xfce4-session version: 4.16.0

References: