GNOME reports GConf Error when logging in

  • 3143431
  • 02-Apr-2008
  • 30-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2)
Novell Linux Desktop 9

Situation

When logging in into a GNOME session the following error message appears:
ERROR: 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://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf for information. (Details - 1: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference 2: Failed to convert IOR '' to an object reference)
In/var/log/messagesthe following error message appears:
ERROR: Mar 17 07:37:11 SERVER gconfd (root-27209): Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Failed to lock './gconfd-root/lock/ior': probably another process has the lock, or your operating system has NFS file locking misconfigured (Resource temporarily unavailable)
This problem also affects newly created users as well as the root user.

Resolution

This issue might be experienced if the environment variable TMPDIR is being set
  • to a wrong path or
  • to a path with improper permissions.
Please ensure the system uses/tmpas TMPDIR (which is the default). In case TMPDIR needs to point to a different directory ensure the permissions are set accordingly (chmod 1777 if shared with other users) on the new destination.