[Openbox] Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment va

[briandanielz]

Hello all. I searched for help on the forums with the below query.
"Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable."
and I was unable to find any posts with the above error. It makes me think I am searching incorrectly, but I digress.

I just installed ubuntu server 14.04

 
somename@server:~$ uname -a
Linux server 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 03:51:08 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and I am just trying to install a simple window manager following.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...wMemorySystems

The steps I have followed are...
1. installed system with openssh-server (guided using entire disk)
2. ran the below commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install xorg 
sudo apt-get install openbox obconf openbox-session

now when I call openbox

Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable.
admini@server:~$ openbox-session 
Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable.
admini@server:~$

Not sure what to do next. I though I would check here first.
Any help would be appreciated.

[vasa1]

Hello all. I searched for help on the forums with the below query.
"Openbox-Message: Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable."
and I was unable to find any posts with the above error. It makes me think I am searching incorrectly, but I digress. ...

I suggest another way of searching and that is to use a search engine. I put your query into Google's search engine and found several hits:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131838
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=297911
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2185245
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...ux-login-fails

[briandanielz]

First, thanks for your help.

I found this one as well while Google searching before I posted here.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2185245 -
While the error is the same, this is not the issue I am experiencing.
The OP in the post above already has a window manager running while I do not have any window manager that will launch at all.

I found this one as well while Google searching before I posted here as well, and this is the post that promoted me to make a post on this board.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131838
This is about the closest to my issue: The problem with that post it only implicitly explains how to fix this issue and on a different distribution.
I see it has something to do about my GPU and a .xinit file. There is hardly any explanation and I do not want to guess and check too much where I can avoid it.

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=297911
This is also not the issue I am experiencing. I am not trying to connect to a remote machine over ssh.
While I am assuming there is some relation is not the issue I am experiencing as far as I can see.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...ux-login-fails
again this is not the issue I am experiencing the OP in that post already has some sort of window manager / gui running.

[steeldriver]

Instead of trying to invoke openbox-session directly, you could instal the xinit package, and then create a minimal ~/.xsession file containing

/usr/bin/openbox-session

and then invoke it using

startx

[briandanielz]

opps.. made a mistake.