Comment 37 for bug 328575

I noticed this problem because my .fluxbox/startup wasn't starting my gnome-terminal anymore. (that's a shell script run by startfluxbox that runs some X clients then execs /usr/bin/fluxbox. I put some of my startup stuff in it.)

 If I run
/usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon &
before gnome-terminal, then it works. If I leave that commented out, gnome-terminal refuses to start, with the "Failed to contact the GConf daemon; exiting." error message everyone's reporting. Obviously when gnome-terminal is run as root, there's no root-owned gconf daemon for it to talk to. (BTW, why would you want to do that? sudo -s not good enough?)

 I already had /usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon in my fluxbox startup, but I used to run it as

gnome-terminal --geometry=132x30 --tab-with-profile=default --tab-with-profile=default --tab-with-profile=default &
(sleep 1 && setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps && xset r rate 195 60 && /usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon ) &

 I use sleep to spread out the disk I/O load of starting X a bit. gnome-terminal used to load, then after gnome-settings-daemon loaded, the font would switch to my configured font. But now my desktop was coming up with no terminal. gnome-terminal would work later, since by then gnome-settings-daemon would be started.

 So now I do
/usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon &
(sleep 1 && gnome-terminal --geometry=132x30 --tab-with-profile=default --tab-with-profile=default --tab-with-profile=default & )
(sleep 1 && setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps && xset r rate 195 60 )&

 and my X startup script should start everything nicely.

 If gnome stuff is going to require daemons, they should start them automatically if they're not running. KDE stuff does that. If GNOME can come up with a convincing reason why this is a bad idea, then this is not a bug. Although it had better be documented, and the error message should suggest starting gnome-settings-daemon. So IMHO something has to change before this bug can be closed.