Comment 51 for bug 328575

I did some brief look, and discovered a workaround, or maybe even a fix:

The message you see comes from gnome-terminal, but it can work fine without gconf, or maybe check for it is broken:

in terminal.c:

  /* If the gconf daemon isn't available (e.g. because there's no dbus
   * session bus running), we'd crash later on. Tell the user about it
   * now, and exit. See bug #561663.
   */
  if (!gconf_ping_daemon ())
    {
      g_printerr ("Failed to contact the GConf daemon; exiting.\n");
      exit (1);
    }

If I comment out this condition block, then it works just fine