While trying to migrate a server from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 today, something went wrong. Upgrading to gcc-4.4 had unmet dependencies. While, trying to solve those, gcc wanted to be installed on a newer version of the kernel, but 1and1.com doesn’t let you upgrade your kernel and so I was left in 1/2 upgraded state with no way up.

It took a while to find a method to downgrade that worked, but then I finally found http://askubuntu.com/questions/49869/how-to-roll-back-ubuntu-to-a-previous-version. The key was to use /etc/apt/preferences to prefer packages at 10.04.

Many sources say that installing the ‘python-software-properties’ package would fix it, but I had to install ‘software-properties-common’

apt-get install software-properties-common

Done!

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