I have a bit of an oddity, and I was wondering if anyone has seen this before. Occasionally, after a reboot, there are two directories in /tmp/ that change ownership from “root” to “gdm”.
Directories
ls -l | grep ".X11\|.ICE"
drwxrwxrwt - gdm 17 Mar 06:12 .ICE-unix/
drwxrwxrwt - gdm 17 Mar 06:12 .X11-unix/
If these directories are owned by gdm when you log into GDM, then Wayland will not start, and GNOME will launch under X11.
To fix it, I can simply log out of GNOME, drop to a VT and change the permissions back to root. Once this is done, GNOME under Wayland will start as expected.
The odd part is, I can check this before a reboot and all is well, but occasionally on boot it changes.
Troubleshooting Performed
- Found older threads around similar issues, and followed through with those, but this seems to be slightly different
- Validated that changing ownership on the two directories temporarily corrects the issue
- Validated that this doesn’t happen with every reboot, but still haven’t figured out what triggers it
- Validated systemd-tmp service config looks “normal”
- Checked ownership of “/” is root via stat command
- Checked journal for previous 3 boots and systemd service file logs for anything related to .X11-unit or .ICE-unix entries
- I only found entries in journal around changing it after broken state
I just enabled gdm debugging, but haven’t caught the error again since, I will update this thread if I am able to find something there.
Any thoughts or help is appreciated. Not the end of the world, but a small annoyance I wouldn’t mind being solved, and I am a bit stumped at this point.
Additional Details
Content of : /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/x11.conf
# This file is part of systemd.
#
# systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
# See tmpfiles.d(5) for details
# Make sure these are created by default so that nobody else can
# or empty them at startup
D! /tmp/.X11-unix 1777 root root 10d
D! /tmp/.ICE-unix 1777 root root 10d
D! /tmp/.XIM-unix 1777 root root 10d
D! /tmp/.font-unix 1777 root root 10d
# Unlink the X11 lock files
r! /tmp/.X[0-9]*-lock
stat status
stat /
File: /
Size: 250 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 0,43 Inode: 256 Links: 1
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2025-03-17 06:09:50.536987296 -0700
Modify: 2024-11-10 11:31:50.369999695 -0800
Change: 2025-03-17 08:52:10.235514293 -0700
Birth: 2023-08-01 11:09:44.465999868 -0700