Example:

$ gconftool-2 –spawn
Failed to spawn the configuration server (gconfd): 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Could not send message to gconf daemon: The name org.gnome.GConf was not provided by any .service files)

But it also happens when GConf-based applications (such as gnome-mplayer) try to spawn gconfd.

The cause seems to be that GConf wants to be started through dbus, but dbus on NixOS doesn’t know about GConf because ${GConf}/share/dbus-1/services/org.gnome.GConf.service isn’t in dbus’s include path.

Submitted on 16 July 2009 at 12:51