Problem is solved. My thanks to all who offered suggestions. Perhaps the below may be useful to someone, sometime.
Several things went wrong - first the ugly. xhost +localhost examines the /etc/hosts file to make sure the host (localhost in this case) is valid. I had copied over the most recent hosts file from another computer. Unfortunately, it was a Windows computer so the file had crlf instead of simple lf line endings. I discovered all those ^M at the end of line when I fired up joe to make sure localhost was in the file - it was but guess the ^M confused xhost. My bad - sorry. After running dos2unix on /etc/hosts I was able to xhost +localhost However that still required me to export DISPLAY=:0 each time. Here is the good. I read Rob Weir's discussion about setting the XAUTHORITY variable in the su environment. I like aliases so I set up a new alias sup='su -p' The -p variable preserves the user's environment and shell, including the XAUTHORITY variable. Now I sup and just run synaptic (my test "suite") and up it comes! Here is the bad which turns out good: For some time I could not su - for some reason. I always got an su: unknown id - error message. While looking for a nice stop in bashrc for my sup alias I found this: alias su='su -' Gee I had forgotten about that and immediately changed it to alias su- The moral of that story is be careful about making aliases with the exact same name as programs that take special parameters like su - since the - is easily confused with an option. In my case I was really typing su - - each time - no wonder it didn't work. Again thanks to all who helped. Larry Alkoff Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
