Description of problem: I use a fvwm-based custom graphical environment (not started through *dm but through startx from a console tty login) and in this environment gnome-terminal refuses to start on my Fedora 21 machine with an extremely unhelpful diagnostic message. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-terminal-3.14.2-2.fc21.x86_64 How reproducible: Completely. I 've rebooted my machine and it still happens. Steps to Reproduce: 1. start gnome-terminal in an xterm window 2. gnome-terminal fails to start and spits out a cryptical error Actual results: bash-4.3$ gnome-terminal Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8 Expected results: A terminal window appears. Additional info: Some Internet searching suggests that this might be related to locales. Locale settings: $ localectl System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 VC Keymap: us X11 Layout: us X11 Model: pc105+inet X11 Variant: terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp, $ printenv | grep L LC_COLLATE=C LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 Clearing these and setting LANG=en_US.UTF-8 makes no difference in the outcome.
Explicitly starting /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server before I try to run gnome-terminal works, but gnome-terminal-server exits after gnome-terminal quits. I assume that this is not how things are supposed to work.
(In reply to Chris Siebenmann from comment #1) > but gnome-terminal-server exits after gnome-terminal quits This one is intended. The server exits when the last terminal is closed, or if no terminal is opened within 10s. Launching g-t should though launch g-t-server if required, but I'm afraid it uses dbus or something similar for that which you don't have running.
I actually have dbus running, started via '/usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session'. With 'dbus-monitor' I can see the request go out over the session dbus to org.freedesktop.DBus (which d-feet tells me is there): method call sender=:1.353 -> dest=org.freedesktop.DBus serial=3 path=/org/freedesktop/DBus; interface=org.freedesktop.DBus; member=StartServiceByName string "org.gnome.Terminal" uint32 0 With dedicated strace work I can see that gnome-terminal-server is started by dbus-daemon but then exits writing an error message to stderr: Non UTF-8 locale (ANSI_X3.4-1968) is not supported! Inspection of the dbus-daemon's /proc/<pid>/environ says that it has no $LANG set but has LC_COLLATE=C. Experimentation suggests that despite there being a system locale set (to a UTF-8 environment), g-t-s now requires either $LC_CTYPE or $LANG to be set explicitly. (Ie, g-t-s will start by hand in my normal environment but if I scrub LC_CTYPE out it will fail to start with the same error message.)
Oh, I see. Then it sounds like https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732127.
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