bad gnome-terminal
So I’ve been a long time proponent of GNOME and all, but I recently switched to awesome instead.
Even so I like gnome-terminal a bit too much, and decided to keep it around until I found a new terminal that doesn’t pull the rest of GNOME with it when I install it.
The problem
Enter emerge -uDNvat and all of a sudden gnome-terminal complains about Failed to contact GConf daemon; exiting.. So I ask around, people reply with something along the lines of “is gconfd-2 started”, “have you installed gconfd?” and “you dumb fuck, why do you use gnome-terminal when you’re not using gnome!”.
The solution
Seems in the end it was a version mismatch, I was using gnome-terminal 2.26.x and my gnome-light package was still 2.24.x. Downgraded gnome-terminal and all was well again.
P.S. I switched to ROXTerm instead, it’s almost a clone, without all the GConf bullshit, or pulling the rest of GNOME in.
Tags: awesome, gconfd, gnome, gnome-terminal, roxterm
I had same problem, but for me the solution was to run “gconftool-2 –spawn” explicitly before running “gnome-terminal”. According to the documentation of gconf it should start automatically, whenever needed. But here it didn’t. So I just added “gconftool-2 –spawn” to my .xsession.
I’m in love with xfce4-terminal, it’s clean, elegant, borderless, scrollbarless, translucent and has great font rendering… you should give it a try
And so I have. I won’t be able to tell the difference between roxterm and xfce’s terminal, it’s all VTE. But it’s good to have the configuration files for all three major GTK/VTE terminals now, this way I won’t have any problem switching between boxes that I don’t have root on.