This will not interest 99% of you at all, but I figured my blog would be a smart place to file it away for personal reference. But, just for you loyal readers, I’ll cut it short, but just in case you’re curious…

I had a HECK of a time getting Thunderbird to run since switching to Xandros a few weeks back. There was some sort of GTK problem with connecting to the display. In the end, I had to do something that I knew had to be done, but I have never seen it done this way before. The strange line below in question is #3, and I still don’t completely understand what difference it makes if you leave out the IP like I did. But, it made all the difference in the world!

I found this post in this forum thread over at LinuxQuestions.org.

Thanks for the replies. I finally fixed the problem by combining all the advice I got from here. Here are the steps I followed:

1. As a normal user do a xhost + to allow anyone to connect to the local display.
2. become root using su -
3. Do an export DISPLAY=:0.0
4. Run the program
5. Grin like an idiot when it finally workes

I added export DISPLAY=:0.0 to root’s .bashrc to allow it to always use the current display.
Thanks for the help.

- Suramya