Re: Message when starting emacs as root

[Tim X]

Cecil Westerhof <Cecil@decebal.nl> writes:

> When I start Emacs as root –from the command line–, I get the
> following message:
>     (emacs:3279): 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; the most
>     common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus
>     daemon. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information.
>     (Details -  1: Failed to get connection to session: Abnormal
>     program termination spawning command line `dbus-launch
>     --autolaunch=609bb989b7d80a921f5561274aef47bc --binary-syntax
>     --close-stderr': )
>
> As a non root user I do not get it. It happens since I updated to
> openSUSE 10.4, which also update Emacs. I now use:
>     GNU Emacs 23.2.1 (i586-suse-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.22.1) of 2011-02-22 
> on build27

Are you trying to run emacs as root from within an X sessions which you
have started as a non-privileged user? If so, this is an error because
xauth cookies are not correctly setup. 

I sometimes see this error when I ssh to a remote system and try to run
some X applications immediately after logging in using XLL forwarding
over ssh. I find running the command a second time and it all works. 

What happens if you start emacs with the -nw switch. If that works, then
it is definitely an X authentication problem. If it still gives the
error, then it is likely a problem further down the chain (i.e. dbus,
gconf).

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au