Bug#918574: Bug 918574: gnome-shell: loops with "failed to bind to /tmp/.X11-unix/X<number>: No such file or directory"

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 gnome-shell: loops with "failed to bind to /tmp/.X11-unix/X<number>: No such file or directory"

On Sat, 12 Jan 2019 at 13:51:11 +0000, Robert Stone wrote:
> I'd appreciate somebody looking at this problem as I cannot use my laptop.

Sorry, I don't have any special insight into this problem or why it has
happened to you. It's often not possible for developers to solve a bug
that can't be reproduced on a system under their control.

Yours is the only report I've seen of a similar situation, so this is
probably something specific to your particular system configuration.
I'll try to give some hints about how to narrow this down to something
actionable (either fixing local misconfiguration or finding a bug that can
be fixed), but the Debian bug tracking system is not really a technical
support helpline.

Jason Crain left a message on the bug that might provide some clues:
> The first question that comes to my mind is whether there is something
> that prevents access to /tmp. Whether the filesystem is mounted readonly
> or perhaps something else is preventing write access to /tmp.

Booting the system into a mode that does not attempt to start GNOME might
provide useful information. To do that, select

    Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux
        -> Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux [some version] (recovery mode)

from the boot menu, or edit the kernel command line in the boot menu
and add "systemd.unit=multi-user.target" (without the quotes) for a
relatively fully-featured text mode, or "single" (single-user mode)
for the same thing as the "recovery mode" in the menu.

Another way to get a basic command prompt is to tell systemd to boot
in rescue mode or in emergency mode, as described here:
https://www.linuxtechi.com/boot-ubuntu-18-04-debian-9-rescue-emergency-mode/

After you are able to get to a command prompt, you could try installing a
different graphical environment like XFCE, or a different display manager
like xdm, to see whether that one worked any better. However, if there
is something wrong with /tmp on your system then I would expect that all
graphical environments would fail similarly (they all use /tmp/.X11-unix
in the same way).

If /tmp isn't read-only, another possibility is that /tmp/.X11-unix is
a symbolic link to somewhere that doesn't exist. If that's the problem,
deleting it should resolve the situation.

Good luck,
    smcv