Bug#574244: Two minute iceweasel startup time, due to gconf trouble

[Mike Hommey]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:18:01AM +0100, Helge Hafting wrote:
> Package: iceweasel
> Version: 3.0.6-3
> Severity: normal
> 
> 
> When I start iceweasel, even in safe mode, two full minutes pass before
> the window appear. After that, browsing seems to work as normal.
> But this waiting is not exactly interesting.
> 
> I get a small window with a big error message:
> 
> 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
> 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
> 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
> 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
> 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
> 
> All the guesses are wrong. The network is up, including loopback. I don't use NFS, and the lockfiles
> mentioned in the URL aren't there. "ps aux" reveals a process called /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2
> I guess iceweasel tried to communicate with that? There are no other processes with "gconf" in the name.

Did you switch user with su or something like that before running
iceweasel ? Or maybe are you running on a remote X server ?
Anyways, please check
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gconf/+bug/367169
There should be an answer to your problem there.

> I wish this app would use a simple textfile for its config, instead of this complicated and bug-prone
> attempt at communicating with _another process over a network_. The textfile approach works so well for many
> other apps, some bigger and some much smaller than iceweasel. 
> 
> Keep it simple. A single config file under .mozilla. and no big directory tree there either. Well,
> I know that won't happen, but one can dream. 

All gnome applications share configuration through gconf. 

Mike