Machine ID
In one of my virtual machines (VMs) I was frustrated that I could not launch X apps through SSH. The error message was about being unable to create a dbus socket.
I noticed the file in $HOME/.dbus/session-dbus was empty. The file has an unusual file name. Eventually I remembered the name of this session file is derived from the dbus machine-id, which on Slackware systems is stored in /var/lib/dbus.
On a whim I deleted both files and rebooted the VM.
Thereafter launching X apps through SSH functioned as expected.
Originally the VM was cloned from another system. I do not know if not changing the machine-id was a part of the dbus failure, but I had run into this when I worked as an admin. During that tenure I had a short shell script snippet to scrub information like that when cloning systems.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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