gconfd Errors in /var/log/messages

[Robby Workman]

Rich Shepard wrote:
>    Since I don't run Gnome, just Xfce, I'd appreciate someone explaining why
> I see the following errors in /var/log/messages, and what I should do to
> eliminate the problems:
> 
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18651): starting (version 2.16.0), pid 18651 user 'rshepard'
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18651): Owner of /tmp/orbit-rshepard is not the current user 
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18651): Owner of /tmp/orbit-rshepard-28a86888 is not the current user 
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18651): Failed to open /tmp/gconfd-rshepard: Permission denied
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18651): Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Directory /tmp/gconfd-rshepard has a problem, gconfd can't use it
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18653): starting (version 2.16.0), pid 18653 user 'rshepard'
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18653): Owner of /tmp/orbit-rshepard is not the current user 
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18653): Owner of /tmp/orbit-rshepard-28a86888 is not the current user 
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18653): Failed to open /tmp/gconfd-rshepard: Permission denied
> messages.1:Jun 29 06:24:16 salmo gconfd (rshepard-18653): Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Directory /tmp/gconfd-rshepard has a problem, gconfd can't use it
> 
>    I get these almost every day.


Rich:

First, I recognize you as a Slackware user :-)
As such, you should not have gconf installed, as gnome does not
ship with Slackware since version 10.1.  That being said, if you
have installed one of the third-party gnome package sets, that
would explain at least part of what you're seeing above, as they
all replace some of the stock Slackware packages, and Xfce would
use some of the replacements, which use gconf, and so on...
Alternatively, Xfce might look for gconf and use it if it's
available - I'm really not sure about that part.  Even so, I think
you have another problem based on what you posted.  It appears as
if you have managed to change the ownership of everything in /tmp
to root:root -- there are quite a few ways that could have happened,
but I'm guessing that you've recently run a package build script
that cd's into /tmp, extracts some source code, then cd's into the
source directory and does a chown -R root:root, but for whatever
reason, the source directory didn't exist, so the cd failed, but then
the chown operated on all of /tmp.  In case it's not obvious, that's
experience talking :-) [1]

[1] A bit off-topic, but that's the reason you see all of those
    "|| exit 1" things in our scripts at SlackBuilds.org (or we
    put a "set -e" at the top).

As an aside, any luck with that HPLIP package I made for you?
(reply to that one privately)

RW