[ALUG] Programs that use dbus appear not to work as remote X clients

[Chris G]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 11:35:07AM +0000, phil.ashby at bt.com wrote:
> > From: Chris G <cl at isbd.net>
> > On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 05:08:16PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > [snip tale of woe]
> >>
> >> So am I missing something or is the whole dbus thing completely broken
> >> if you're trying to use X in the classic way with remote applications?
> >> I've done a few Google searches and didn't find anything very obvious
> >> about this so *maybe* there is something vital I'm missing, or maybe
> >> no one now uses remote X (at least not with Gnome).
> >>
> > Further Google searching has revealed the answer, simple but decidedly
> > not obvious.  I need to enter 'dbus-launch planner' at the remote
> > prompt, this apparently tells the remote system that the dbus it needs
> > to talk to is on my desktop.
> > 
> > Anyway, it works now.
> 
> According to 'man dbus-launch' this doesn't connect said program to the dbus session bus on your desktop, but starts a fresh session bus on the remote machine - thus your application config (in the case of Yelp) and other dbus connected services are stored on the remote machine. Said man page also indicates that a dbus session should be started automatically by the libdbus client if there isn't one running however this seems to fail in your case.
> 
Yes, it was seeing lots of messages about failed 'dbus-launch' in the
error messages I was getting that led me towards looking for issues
with dbus.  It may well be that my interpretation of what's going on
is wrong but surely that dbus traffic does *eventually* need to get
across to the X server.  When you run just 'planner' it does appear to
try and do a dbus-launch but fails.

-- 
Chris Green