my name is mwd

Another post that’s just here really to help the lost if they’re googling for solutions :) I spent the last day battling with dbus, trying to get an updated version to work on ubuntu Edgy, which had an older version.

I installed a new version over the old one (I originally tried installing a second dbus in /usr/local, but that got too confusing to debug), and things were well, running away, but some services where failing to start. For me neither the HAL service nor the Avahi service would start due to security errors like:

16:34:02.286 [E] hald_dbus.c:3269: dbus_bus_request_name(): Connection ”:1.7” is not allowed to own the service “org.freedesktop.Hal” due to security policies in the configuration file

I checked and double checked the security policies specified in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ in various conf files. I event went as far as opening everything up, and still nothing would work. I spent ages hitting this.

Eventually I discovered this dude had had the same problem. When you configure dbus and the dbus glib you need to specify where it keeps various things, a lot more so than with normal programs that use configure, where prefix is usually all you need to set pathwise. I’d remembered to set localstatedir, but not sysconfdir, so it had put all it’s conf files in /usr/etc, and /etc files were from the original install. Once I fixed that it all worked.

Now on to the next issue :) I’m trying at the moment to get Sugar, the GUI being built for the One Laptop Per Child project to run, and they’ve not made it easy :)