more GNOME problems

[Dan Engholm <mustang%no_spammers_engholm.org@localhost>]

Last quarter, I had some problems compiling the gnome package under 
NetBSD because of XFree86 not having xdamage and xcomposite.  With some 
help from OBATA Akio, I did get the compilation to complete.  I 
installed the resulting packages on my main machine and found it to be 
unstable, so I went back to the Q1 version.  This time, I tried GNOME on 
my build virtual machine first and the instability was still present.  
Searching Google, I did not find a lot of information on this problem 
but one reference claims it was solved in gnome-desktop version 2.22.0.  
I started looking into version numbers a bit and became confused.

Alistair's announcement of pkgsrc-2008Q3 says that GNOME has been 
updated to version 2.22.3.  meta-pkgs/gnome/Makefile says that it is 
version 2.18.1.  Are we really at 2.22.3?

In any case, my main NetBSD machine runs in a Xen guest domain.  As a 
result, I run a vncserver as its graphical display.  .vnc/xstartup 
starts the GNOME desktop using this command:

   exec /usr/bin/ssh-agent -- dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session

Once the desktop is up and running, I get occasional error dialog 
windows that say:

   There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.

   Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not
   work correctly.

   The last error message was:

   Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)

   GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you
   log in.

Indeed, my chosen theme (crux) comes and goes with the interesting 
effect of narrowing my terminal window column by column.  Also, response 
time is really slow while nautilus sucks up CPU time.

In desperation, I removed all of my .gnome directories so they would get 
regenerated.  This had no effect other than to make me redo all of my 
customizations.  (Next time, I'll make copies, first. ;-)

Has anybody else seen this sort of problem?  Better yet, does anybody 
know what I can do to fix the problem?

--Dan