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

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.

I’ve seen this once before and couldn’t remember the exact package I needed to update, so I figured I’d make a post about it so I could find it easily if I came across this again.

Sometimes when emergeing new packages you will get an error like the following:

checking for perl… /usr/bin/perl
checking for XML::Parser… configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool
!!! Please attach the following file when filing a report to bugs.gentoo.org:
!!! /var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/work/xkeyboard-config-0.8/config.log
!!! ERROR: x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1 failed.
Call stack:
ebuild.sh, line 1621: Called dyn_compile
ebuild.sh, line 973: Called qa_call ‘src_compile’
ebuild.sh, line 44: Called src_compile
xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1.ebuild, line 49: Called econf ‘–with-xkb-base=/usr/share/X11/xkb’ ‘–enable-compat-rules’ ‘–disable-xkbcomp-symlink’ ‘–with-xkb-rules-symlink=xorg’
ebuild.sh, line 578: Called die
!!! econf failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
!!! A complete build log is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/temp/build.log’.

Thanks to this post on karakas-online.de, we can see that this probably really means that perl is unable to load the XML::Parser. You can run the following command at the command line to see exactly why that’s happening:

# /usr/bin/perl -e “require XML::Parser”

In my case this resulted in:

Can’t load ‘/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/auto/XML/Parser/Expat/Expat.so’ for module XML::Parser::Expat: libexpat.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at -e line 1.

And so, even though this package was already installed, I just remerged it, replacing what was there before like so:

emerge -av XML-Parser

After doing this, you should be able to continue your original emerge. I’m not sure what is happening to this package that requires you to do this, but it seems to fix the problem. *shrug*