Xserver refusing to start during boot on OpenSUSE?

If you’re on OpenSUSE and your X server refuses to start on boot, and stays blank on manual startx, spitting out errors that look like this:

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libXi.so.6: undefined symbol: XESetWireToEventCookie

You’ve probably been a bad boy/girl and have been playing with non-standard Xorg drivers and repositories haven’t you :P Here’s what you can try on the terminal (since that’s all you’d have if X refuses to start): Symlink libXi.so.6 to libXi.so.6.0.0 instead of libXi.so.6.1.0 in /usr/lib, or /usr/lib64 on 64 bit systems.

# cd /usr/lib
# rm libXi.so.6
# ln -s libXi.so.6.0.0 libXi.so.6

That should hopefully let you startx, where you should probably proceed to remove the libXi package from Yast – as well as every other non-standard package you installed :) Source here.

Btw, yes this happened to me, and I was frantic. I’m reasonably comfortable on the console but as long as my DE wouldn’t start neither would my networkmanager, which means I had no internet – and which means my package manager commands were useless! Playing with Xorg drivers bit me hard that time. Srs bsns, it is. As someone wisely said in the source thread, “For the next time: adding experimental repos brings you in a world where you’re on your own, and where things like you’ve met now, easily happen.”