This problem started so long ago that I really have no insight into when or why it first started happening, but for a while now, whenever I started X with the `startx` command, I would get the following error message:

There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.
Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work
correctly.
The Settings Daemon restarted too many times.

After poking around for a little while, I finally came across Gentoo Bug 150909. I didn’t have the linking problem found by Stian Skejelstad, but Daniel Gryniewicz’s Comment to add eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session` to your ~/.xinitrc worked great.

My ~/.xinitrc now looks like this:

#– ~/.xinitrc
eval `dbus-launch –sh-syntax –exit-with-session`
exec gnome-session
#exec startfluxbox

Some times use after recovering an entire hard drive image, you may want to mount a partition that was on that disk, instead of apply it to another drive. In those times, you can use the following commands:

First, you will want to find out where the partition starts:

sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd

The -uS flag to sfdisk forces the output to be given in sectors (512 bytes), so the number you see there will need to be multiplied by 512.

Then:

mount -oloop,offset=xxxx image.dd /mnt/point

That’s it!

I just installed Drivel, which seems to be a pretty nice Linux application to post entries to your blog right from your desktop. It supports a few different blogging technologies, including WordPress, Drupal, blogger.com, and livejournal. I’m hoping having this around will reduce the amount of effort in making a blog post, and hence will start blogging more.