# X applications disappear from screen



## singular1ty (Jun 6, 2014)

I have installed FreeBSD as a Guest OS in VirtualBox under OSX, and I have installed xorg as well as stumpwm. However, whenever I start X and try to run an application, the applications flickers on the screen and then disappears. This happened the first couple times I ran X, and now stumpwm isn't even showing up. I had the same problem with a completely separate install with xmonad as the wm, and I tried reinstalling from scratch thinking I must have screwed something up, but to no avail. Any ideas?

EDIT: And now it crashed several times and won't boot again  -_-


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## wblock@ (Jun 6, 2014)

Start with twm(1).  It's installed with the full Xorg port.  If you did not install the full Xorg port, go back and do that now.  Then copy the last five lines of /usr/local/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc.  Then run `startx`.

If you have modified /etc/make.conf, particularly with CFLAGS[/files] settings or other go-fast stripes, remove all that and rebuild ports.


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## singular1ty (Jun 7, 2014)

I think I corrupted my install accidentally by quitting VirtualBox while the OS was booting. So I tried reinstalling from scratch and now my system is running correctly, with xorg and awesome for a wm. But when I try to launch a new xterm instance it often still does something similar where xterm flashes on for a brief moment and then disappears. This leads to mashing mod4+return until an instance finally stays open. It works fine under twm however, but seemingly no other wm.

EDIT: It may be useful to add that running `xterm` from within xterm exhibits the same behaviour.


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## wblock@ (Jun 7, 2014)

Others have reported this: Thread 44758

I've never seen it, but that might be because I use csh(1).


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