Advisory: beagle-search does not start in recent KDE3

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

Problem: Recent beagle-search does not start in KDE-3. When started
from a terminal, it will crash saying
"System.Exception: Unable to open the session message bus.". This only
happens in some distributions.

Workaround: Make sure session dbus is running. You can check by
verifying that "echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" is non-empty. If your
distribution has stopped starting session dbus in KDE-3, you can use a
tip from http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_D-BUS_Session_Bus_with_KDM:

Simply create the following file and give yourself read and execute
permissions. (the ~/.kde/env directory probably won't exist. Just
create it.)

File: ~/.kde/env/start_dbus_session_bus.sh
------------------------------------------------------------
# test for an existing bus daemon, just to be safe
if test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ; then
        # if not found, launch a new one
        eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session`
fi
------------------------------------------------------------

All you need to do now is log out. The session bus will now start
every time you log in, and exit when you log out.

Explanation: Earlier Xsession used to start the session dbus at login.
Most likely some kind of Xsession.d script. Some distributions
recently dropped the file. Recent beagle-search requires session dbus
to be running (not the fake kind priovided by dbus-launch but a real
session dbus). This is not a problem in Gnome since it starts dbus at
login (this is what I have been told). Apparently Xfce and some others
do that too. But KDE-3 does not. This makes it impossible to run
beagle-search in recent KDE-3.