Problems when running gconf-based applications on a remote desktop

Some additional notes:

1. My Inbox contains around 100000 mails. To avoid getting hit by bug 518336 I have turned off the global search.

2. Last week thunderbird-bin consumed 100% CPU, but after a kernel update to fix bug 609113 thunderbird did not consume 100% CPU any more while it is frozen/grayed.

3. During the freeze (grayed) phases Thunderbird probably tries to access GConf and times out, but I am not sure what really happens.

seb128, why did you set this bug to "Invalid" without a comment? Is this not a bug? Is it a bug of Thunderbird? Does it work for you?

A workaround is to run the command

/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 &

in the SSH session. Then all apps started out of it (and already running in it) work normally again.

So the problem to be solved is making this automatic. Either the SSH login must somehow trigger the gconfd being started or wrapper scripts need to get added to the mentioned applications.

Note also that the applications worked flawlessly out of SSH before Maverick.

Oliver Grawert (ogra) suggests on IRC that probably the defaults of gconf, dbus, or xauth have changed somehow.

sorry I'm at GUADEC and got interrupted while typing, the issue is that gconf needs a dbus session bus, you can run your command using dbus-launch to workaround the bug

Running

/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2 &

does not work always. The more reliable workaround is to wrap the apps with "dbus-launch" to make sure that they have a session bus available:

dbus-launch thunderbird &
dbus-launch ooffice &

Running: compiz --replace gconf

Returns:

(process:2314): GLib-WARNING **: In call to g_spawn_sync(), exit status of a child process was requested but SIGCHLD action was set to SIG_IGN and ECHILD was received by waitpid(), so exit status can't be returned. This is a bug in the program calling g_spawn_sync(); either don't request the exit status, or don't set the SIGCHLD action.
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; the most common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus daemon. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Abnormal program termination spawning command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=872829da6bf75a6b345783c84c5e0758 --binary-syntax --close-stderr': )

Runs fine when wrapped in dbus, as stated above: dbus-launch compiz --replace gconf

Hey Till,

Thanks for testing maverick during its development period. Unfortunately it looks like this bug report didn't get attention during the maverick development period. But I see there's not been more comments on the bug since the release, which makes me wonder if this is still an issue for you?

If you've not seen this issue since maverick's release yourself, it may have been solved by kernel or X or other updates that occurred late in the release; if so, would you mind please closing the bug for us? Go to the URL mentioned in this bug report, click the yellow icon(s) in the status column and set to 'Fix Released'.

If you no longer have the hardware needed to reproduce the problem, or otherwise feel the bug no longer needs tracked in Launchpad, you can set the status to 'Invalid'.

If you are the original reporter and still have this issue, just reply to this email saying so. (Or set the bug status to Confirmed.) If you are able to re-test this against 11.04 Natty Narwhal (our current development focus) and find the issue still affects Natty, please also run 'apport-collect <bug-number>' while running natty, which will add fresh logs and debug data, and flag it for the Ubuntu-X development team to look at.

For me the problem does not occur any more in Natty. Thank you very much.

I have the problem in 11.04.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.