Raspian 18th March edition - Help !

[timmoore46]

I have a 8MP camera fitted and have been enjoying getting to know its ways...but

when I turned it on (WiFi onboard latest Pi) it only got as par as the Terminal prompt , no GUI.

so I typed startx

After a long screen full of lines of code etc etc etc it came up with this:-

Fatal Server error:
(EE) Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tX0-lock
(EE)
(EE)
Please consult The X.org foudation support at htttp://wiki.X.org for help

(EE)
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X Server:
Connection refused

xinit server error
xauth: error in locking authority file /home/pi/.Xauthority

____

Is the OS nuked ? Should I best Win32 image a fresh copy of Raspian.... : (((

Or is it recoverable ?

One error I made was I'd forgotten to attach the mouse also the keyboard. Could that have caused it ?

Any thought anyone ? I'm way out of my depth on how to fix this !



Tim

[DougieLawson]

Do NOT use sudo startx, ever it messes things up and makes you think the OS needs re-installing.

sudo rm /home/pi/.Xauthority; sudo reboot should fix all of your problems.

[timmoore46]

Alas it came back with

rm: cannot remove /home/pi/.Xauthority : Read-only file system

Many thanks for responding , greatly appreciated.



Tim

[DougieLawson]

rm: cannot remove /home/pi/.Xauthority : Read-only file system

Get another SDCard and a USB SDCard reader. Build a "rescue" system on the new SDCard (Raspbian or NOOBS/Raspbian). Mount your SDCard with the read-only filesystem in the USB reader and see if you can repair it. If not see if you can retrieve your data and programs from that card.

[timmoore46]

Many thanks for responding !

The certainty of me being able to achieve that is unknown... but I can re-image the SD card and rebuild the OS to the state it was before the difficulties is certain especially as I have a spare card in a working Pi B. so I can swap out..

How about chown ? Could I not alter the characteristics of the alleged faulty file ? Or is it a can of worms best left undisturbed?

Many thanks for your support !

: )))

Tim

[DougieLawson]

Using chown may be a possibility, it depends how confident you are working with the Linux command line and whether we've identified the root cause of your problems.

[timmoore46]

I'm ok with Bash but remembering the only error message one OS had was 'bdos error on A' meant it had a problem.......and nothing to do with A *.*

Quote...

'whether we've identified the root cause of your problems'

I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case....

In the event I just started from scratch again. But stumbled into a strange problem loading VLC. I'm trying to get it to play video clips in MP4 / .h264 format and get the 30 fps right.

(I've got the latest 8MP camera attached) But the apt-get install vlc version of vlc isn't getting the fps right and I seem to remember there were variants possible, but I've not found reference to it again (should have made a note of it at the time ! *LOL*)

The version I had running before I nuked Raspian did the job nicely.

Nothing like a challenge *LOL*

Many thanks again for responding,

Tim