# OOD 1.5.5: Interactive Desktop showing black screen, no /run/user/$UID directory
**URL:** https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568
**Category:** Get Help
**Tags:** question
**Created:** [October 24, 2019, 5:37pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568 "2019-10-24T17:37:09Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@rengland](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/rengland)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2019, 5:37pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/1 "2019-10-24T17:37:09Z")
After a reboot of our (one and only, for now) OOD 1.5.5 client node, I discovered that though I could connect to an Interactive Desktop (MATE), it was all black. Upon examination of my session log, it was clear that the reason was that dconf lacked permissions to create a `/run/user/$UID` directory. I set the permissions on /run/user to `0777`, which did work, but is too ugly for my taste and shouldn’t be necessary. My `bc_desktop/template/script.sh.erb` was setting `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR` to `"/tmp/${UID}"`, which was the default configuration, but it appeared that that wasn’t being passed to `dconf`.
My solution was to edit `script.sh.erb` and move the `export` command that sets `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR` from the end of the template to just preceding the “`Launching desktop`” message. That seems to be working for me now, but I am hoping that for my edification, someone with more experience with OOD could tell me if that is really a good solution, or if that is going to cause some other undesirable side effects. I’m supposed to have this thing ready for our early adopters within a week, and would just like some confidence that I’m doing the right thing here.
Thank you!
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### Author:  [@rodgers.355](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/rodgers.355)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2019, 6:30pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/2 "2019-10-24T18:30:03Z")
Richard, you’re using the same solution (setting a custom `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR`) that I have used to get around the permissions problem in the [KDE example](https://github.com/OSC/bc_desktop_example_kde/blob/master/template/script.sh#L9). I’m running it by one of our sysadmins now to confirm if it’s an acceptable production solution, or if there is a better way.
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### Author:  [@rodgers.355](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/rodgers.355)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2019, 7:11pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/3 "2019-10-24T19:11:26Z")
I just heard back from Trey:
“I see no problem setting `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR` to some unique temp directory. If this is in context of a job you could also maybe use `$TMPDIR` which is pretty common pattern for HPC to set to some place in `/tmp` that belongs to a user’s job. `$TMPDIR` is cleaned up by epilog but random other places used by `mktemp` will eventually get cleaned up too by systemd which cleans /tmp and /var/tmp depending on files age.”
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### Author:  [@rengland](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/rengland)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2019, 7:29pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/4 "2019-10-24T19:29:03Z")
Thank you. I’d seen several other discourse entries for other issues in which the proposed solution was to set `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR` to `/tmp/$UID` or to simply `unset` it. At least on my installation, that was already being done, but only after `dconf` had already executed. It sounds like that’s probably just fine. It does seem to be the smallest change I could make to get it working for me, and that is what I was going for. I appreciate you sharing the feedback.
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### Author:  [@bennet](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/bennet)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2020, 2:29am UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/5 "2020-02-11T02:29:07Z")
The `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR` is supposed to be set by `pam_systemd`, and it is usually set to `/run/user/`. It would be possible, inadvertantly, for some other use to create a file or directory in `/tmp` that is the same as the UID of another user.
`pam_systemd` is being circumvented because OOD isn’t using pam to authenticate the user.
One way to deal with this is to add something like
```auto
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$(mktemp -d $USER.XDG.XXXXXXX)
```
to the end of the user’s `.bashrc` file, then in the `.bash_logout` file, add
```auto
rm -rf $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
```
It seems like there should be a way to get reproduce the session setup done by pam\_systemd/systemd-logind.service. Alas, I don’t have any good suggestions how to do that.
One might think that `/bin/su - username`, which starts a login shell, might start an actual login session, but that might be an abuse of PAM, which wants the user to authenticate. Probably wouldn’t want `/bin/su - username` to get kerberos credentials, either.
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### Author:  [@westburg.2](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/westburg.2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2022, 3:33pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/ood-1-5-5-interactive-desktop-showing-black-screen-no-run-user-uid-directory/568/6 "2022-05-26T15:33:56Z")