Re: Failed to contact configuration server

[Martin Owens <doctormo gmail com>]

Hey Sean,

This same problem has killed my own desktop changing project:
https://launchpad.net/gnome-wallchanger

I've looked for solutions, and there ain't any easy ones. The measure of
stopping gconf changes via processes that are outside of the GUI
instance is a royal pain for the crontab. If you can add some of the ENV
vars, it should work.

The only real stable solution is to develop a crontab that runs inside
of gnome when you log on. Or just convince gnome devs to abandon gconf
in favour of yaml XDG config files. (heh)

I've heard the advice from certain devs who will suggest that you should
create a daemon process that runs all the time. Although that rather
defeats the point of having infrastructural components which save the
dev time, and the user computer's resources.

Oh well, back to doing something more useful, beating head against a
brick wall.

Regards, Martin

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 08:07 -0600, Sean Carrick wrote:
> Hey All!
> 
> I've got a Python script that changes my desktop background and it
> works great, when I run it from the CLI.  However, I want my
> background to be changed automatically, so I placed a call to this
> script in my `crontab' file.  I know the script is running, because I
> get email messages from `cron', but the messages contain the following
> error:
> 
> glib.GError: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible
> causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you
> have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1:
> Not running within active session)
> 
> Why is it that this script works fine and changes the desktop
> background when I manually run it, but I get this error when the same
> script is run as a `cron' job?  Can you please help.
> 
>          Sean Carrick
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> 
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