Trouble starting dbus.

[wdc@…]

I performed an upgrade from 10.8.6 to 10.9.5, following the instructions at ​https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration and the upgrade was successful for the most part.

I had trouble getting meld, which uses gtk2 and dbus running. It blew out with "dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoMemory: Not enough memory" which generally indicates failure to start dbus.

I hopped on the IRC channel and chatted a bit, and was pointed at ​https://trac.macports.org/ticket/45309 In that ticket I and others were working through what was believed to be a bug in gtk2's use of dbus.

In my note to the case I showed the detailed error output from the failure to start meld along with ps output that showed dbus WAS running:

wdc-home-2:gnucash wdc$ ps axwww | grep dbus
65716   ??  Ss     0:00.01 /opt/local/bin/dbus-daemon --nofork --session
66022 s001  S+     0:00.01 grep dbus

Here is where it gets interesting, and why I'm opening a new ticket.

I let the other ticket run a while, but today I decided to poke at it:

I had an inactive dbus @1.8.6_0

So I did: sudo port activate dbus @1.8.6_0

I also did launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

Seeing another note saying there were two components to dbus, I then did:

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.freedesktop.dbus-system.plist
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist 
launchctl start org.freedesktop.dbus-system
launchctl start org.freedesktop.dbus-session

and meld started just fine.

Ok, I figure it's either that I needed dbus-system running, or it's a problem with 1.8.8.

One at a time I stepped through things until I am in my present state:

dbus @1.8.8_0 (active)
only org.freedesktop.dbus-session active in launchctl
meld running just fine.

Why might this be?

One other difference: I did NOT restart my mac after doing the first dbus install.

So: Is it possible that a reboot is required after the first dbus install? Or is it possible that something didn't get properly setup with my migration and initial install of dbus 1.8.8?

I'd like to reply to trac 45309 or help figure out why dbus isn't starting for others (i.e. why it didn't work initially for me.)

Please advise.

[jeremyhu (Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia)]

No need to 'launchctl start ...'

The daemon would need to be loaded into the system domain. You should instead do:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.freedesktop.dbus-system.plist
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist 

Note that you'd need to logout and log back in (or just reboot) in order for the LaunchAgent's environment variable to propagate to your processes.