Arch Linux

kidawesome

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2008-10-04

Posts: 13

Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

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: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/UNKNOWN:1.0)

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: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/UNKNOWN:1.0)

Pretty much every application on my system will throw out this error.

baeksu

Member

From: Suwon, Korea

Registered: 2007-09-03

Posts: 15

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I had the same problem when I was running gnome on ubuntu.

Workaround is to kill the gconf daemon. When it starts up again, the error message should be temporarily gone.

Googling turned up some suggestions related to filesystem errors or stale nfs mounts, but even after fsck'ing my drives and rebooting, the error message would pop up.

I never found a permanent fix, so I switched to apps that don't depend on gconf. That's hardly an optimal solution, but I couldn't find any other solution.

---

Gnome:
1. A legendary being.
2. A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.

kidawesome

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2008-10-04

Posts: 13

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I had the same problem when I was running gnome on ubuntu.

Workaround is to kill the gconf daemon. When it starts up again, the error message should be temporarily gone.

Googling turned up some suggestions related to filesystem errors or stale nfs mounts, but even after fsck'ing my drives and rebooting, the error message would pop up.

I never found a permanent fix, so I switched to apps that don't depend on gconf. That's hardly an optimal solution, but I couldn't find any other solution.

building gconf from source fixed my problems actually...

cb474

Member

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 469

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

Does building gconf from source remain the only solution?

I'm just installing a new Arch system for the first time. I get this error if I launch gedit from a root terminal or nautilus. Root terminal in Applications > Accessories won't launch at all, after typing in my password in the pop up dialogue. It seems like this problem has been around since Gnome 2.24, but I've installed 2.26 and see no difference. (By the way, my old Debian testing system has exactly the same issues.) Anyway, I'm just getting frustrated with this. I can't understand why it wasn't fixed in 2.26. It seems like a pretty major bug that undermines the usability of a lot of Gnome.

I did strangely notice though, that if I try to open a root terminal, from Applications > Accessories. After that fails, I can then successful launch gedit and nautilus from a root prompt that I enter just through "su" in a regular terminal window.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-04-08 11:26:17)

cb474

Member

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 469

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I followed the suggestions in other posts about reinstalling policykit and gnome-settings-daemon to try to fix this problem, with no luck. See: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56215 and: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p … 6&p=130562.

When I open gedit or nautilus from a root terminal prompt, I get the error posted at the outset of this thread:

GConf error: 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: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)

Also, the root terminal application from Applications > Accessories won't launch at all.

In the Debian forums, some people have reported success by upgrading to gksu 2.0.2. This didn't help me on my older Debian system, but I wonder if it would work with Arch (I decided to try Arch in part to try to resolve some of these problems that weren't getting fixed in Debian). The problem is, Arch's gksu is out of date (still 2.0.0--it hasn't been upgraded for six months). Can I install from source by pulling it from the Debian archives? (http://packages.debian.org/sid/gksu). Apparently gksu's author is the Debian developer.

Or do I not need gksu at all? Gnome's web site says policykit is replacing gksu, but some applications still need it so there's a new gksu that uses policykit as a backend (see: http://live.gnome.org/gksu).

I've read a lot about this, but continue to be stymied by the problem. And I'm surprised that others don't have it or can fix it, yet I've got the same problem both with Debian Testing/Unstable and with Arch. Since I'm trying to switch to Arch, I guess that's where I'd most like to fix the problem.

Any suggestions? Should I try i686 instead of x64? Should I build gconf from source? How would I do that? Thanks for any ideas from anybody.

autonymous

Member

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 31

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I just ran into this bug today also...

While I am not completely opposed to the policykit approach, having a *broken* gksu is a PITA right now.  Anybody have a known current workaround until the gsku/policykit solution is released?

cb474

Member

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 469

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I've found if I log into root as a login shell (whatever that is), then I can launch gedit and nautilus without problem from the command line. So use:

su -

or

su -l

Instead of plain "su". I forget where I read about this trick.

I've also just started using nano to edit documents that need root privileges, which I thought would annoy me, but I've come to kind of like it.

diegognavarro

Member

Registered: 2007-09-25

Posts: 3

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I don't know wich component was the real problem... but I did a

pacman -Sy extra/gconf-editor extra/gconf extra/gconf-perl extra/gconfmm community/ruby-gconf2

then a reboot and the problem has gone.

cb474

Member

Registered: 2009-04-04

Posts: 469

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I don't know wich component was the real problem... but I did a

pacman -Sy extra/gconf-editor extra/gconf extra/gconf-perl extra/gconfmm community/ruby-gconf2

then a reboot and the problem has gone.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this and it did not solve the problem for me, unfortunately. Apparently I did not have glib-perl, gconf-perl, gconfmm, ruby, ruby-glib2, and ruby-gconf2 installed anyway, which all installed when I ran this. Only gconf and gconf-editor showed as reinstalling. So I removed those extra packages when the problem wasn't fixed for me. I assume they're all for programming?

Zoranthus

Member

From: muc

Registered: 2006-11-22

Posts: 166

Re: Strange Gconf error.. X based applications are rendered pretty useless

I don't know wich component was the real problem... but I did a

pacman -Sy extra/gconf-editor extra/gconf extra/gconf-perl extra/gconfmm community/ruby-gconf2

then a reboot and the problem has gone.

This worked for me too, thank you.