X11 startup problems

[JPGConnolly]

I frequently have to use X11. For various reasons I'd rather forget, I'm having to run a Macbook (2012) from an external clone (CCCloner) running OS X 10.6.8.

Mainly in order to keep a few X11 things running.

Now recently, it's started misbehaving:
First, xterm started up without any buttons/borders: Just a plain square, upper left hand corner.
Second, it ceased to start up at all.

After much painful fiddling with CCCloner backups, filing disks, and whatnot, O found the following fixed things:

cp -r '/_CCC Archives/2012-05-29 (May 29) 02-00-11/usr/X11' /usr/X11

that is, restoring the X11 directory alone was enough.

Today: It stops working again, for no reason I can see.
After more fiddling, and trying "xstart", I think I found "~/.Xauthority" and "~/.Xauthority-n" were missing.

So I replaced them from the same backup as above (or rather one three days later) with

sudo cp "/Volumes/Citronnier/_CCC Archives/2012-06-03 (June 03) 23-14-07/Users/jpconn/.Xauthority" ~/
sudo cp "/Volumes/Citronnier/_CCC Archives/2012-06-03 (June 03) 21-10-10/Users/jpconn/.Xauthority-n" ~/

... and now X11 is working again, and XFig, gnu backgammon, and NoMachine are back (NXClient and XFig the most essential things there).

Finally, though it's working, I don't know what I'm doing.

Can anyone help fix this broken X11 ? Or explain what's going on ?

Cheers, James

 

[JPGConnolly]

in case it's any help to anyone, this X11 issue was solved after some hours experimentation by:

- Removing all trace of XQuartz which I'd had a look at:
sudo rm -rf /opt/X11* /Library/Launch*/org.macosforge.xquartz.* /Applications/Utilities/XQuartz.app /etc/*paths.d/*XQuartz
sudo pkgutil --forget org.macosforge.xquartz.pkg

- Replacing /usr/X11 from a backup

- Removing ACLs from a number of files with chmod -N or chmod -RN where appropriate:
~/.serv*
~/.XAuth*
~/.fontconfig

Starting X11 with startx fromt he terminal was revealing: error messages showed what was problematic, in particular fontconfig.

My guess is the only essential steps are removing ACLs, but I'm sure a knowledgable geek somewhere can explain this.