I suggest you look for an.xsession. /home/hlovdal/.xauthority not writable, changes will be ignored and xclock. You are probably getting the message because a bad xauthority.
Afaik not having one initially is not a problem in itself. When i ssh into a headless linux mint 17 system, it doesn't create update / create an.xauthority file. I want to create it, please tell me the steps to do so in ubuntu 10.10.
I've now run into two instances where i've received errors because the ~/.xauthority file is required but is missing from my user folder. The arch wiki suggests defining export xauthority=$xdg_runtime_dir/xauthority but neither. The.xauthority file (not.xauthority) can be found in each user home directory and is used to store credentials in cookies used by xauth for authentication of x sessions. Moreover, when i run xauth i get the reply:
Marty@n40l ~ $ xauth xauth:. I recently found numerous.xauthority.zy43ow as well as numerous.goutputstream.df55oz files in my home directory (the 6 character file extensions were of course all different). I have read that the.xauthority file has been. Xauthority is used by xauth (as mentioned by c4747p) and contains the name of the file with your x privilege tokens.