How to fix “X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting.”?

This is just a simple tips to solve a error message when you start your X session with “startx” command as normal user. The error message may be like this:

blackgod@debian:~$ startx

xauth: creating new authority file /home/blackgod/.Xauthority

X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting.

In linux, by default root user is allowed to run X server in most cases. So you don’t face this issue while running “startx” as root user.

Basically the Xorg X server needs to be configured to to authorize this user. Where should we configure this?

/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config – This file has as setting called “allowed_users”. It can accept three values:

1. root
2. anybody
3. console

The above values are self explanatory. You can edit this value to set as anybody for normal user to start X server. If normal user starts X server from console, console can also be set. It can be like this.

allowed_users=anybody

In Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu, you can run the following command to do it in user friendly screen as shown below.

# dpkg-reconfigure x11-common