dbus-launch and gnome-session

["Scott J. Harmon" <harmon ksu edu>]

Hello all,

I just wanted to save some people out there, who may be trying to build
gnome, some of their hair...

In gnome 2.16 gnome-session now starts gnome-settings-daemon through
dbus. So you probably know that you need dbus-launch running now in
order to start gnome...no problem.  Following the man page of
dbus-launch, we decided to run dbus-launch upon login on the system
(i.e. in the profile).  This seemed to work fine for gnome 2.14.  But
last night I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why
gnome-settings-daemon was not launching in gnome 2.16.  I realized it
was being started by dbus, but didn't see why it was failing.  After
much hair pulling and such.  We realized that dbus-launch didn't know
anything about the X session and was trying to start
gnome-settings-daemon, which needs the X session environment variables
set. Do-oh!  So, it was working fine with gdm (since it started X before
logging the person in, but not with startx, since you logged in before
you started X).

Just thought I'd share this if anyone else happened to run into it.

Thanks,

Scott.
-- 
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra