GLib-Warning & GConf Error when launching emacs

M. Marschall ♦ 05/01/2011 ♦ 1 Comment

When launching emacs from terminal in my openbox system, I got the following warning message (emacs started all the same):

~$ emacs

(emacs:3073): 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; 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: Failed to get connection to session: Abnormal program termination when spawning command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=00ec883e2ef0c03f526815134ab95549 --binary-syntax --close-stderr': )

The solution to this problem was the following: I changed the .xinitrc from

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver -no-splash &
exec ck-launch-session openbox-session

to

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver -no-splash &
exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session ck-launch-session openbox-session

Specifying to launch dbus turned out to be the solution.