meld crashed with GError in _save_history(): Configuration server couldn't be contacted: D-BUS error: [...]

[Daniel Richard G.]

I'm not sure what's wrong with my gconf setup (my homedir is served out of AFS, which I suspect is the root of the problem), but it would really be helpful if Meld could handle these errors more gracefully.

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: meld 1.5.2-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-13.22-generic 3.0.6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-13-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: openafs
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Dec 13 16:43:56 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/meld
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.7
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/meld file1 file2
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LC_COLLATE=C
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
PythonArgs: ['/usr/bin/meld', 'file1', 'file2']
SourcePackage: meld
Title: meld crashed with GError in _save_history(): Configuration server couldn't be contacted: D-BUS error: Unable to store a value at key '/apps/gnome-settings/meld/history-fileentry', as the configuration server has no writable databases. There are some common causes of this problem: 1) your configuration path file /etc/gconf/2/path doesn't contain any databases or wasn't found 2) somehow we mistakenly created two gconfd processes 3) your operating system is misconfigured so NFS file locking doesn't work in your home directory or 4) your NFS client machine crashed and didn't properly notify the server on reboot that file locks should be dropped. If you have two gconfd processes (or had two at the time the second was launched), logging out, killing all copies of gconfd, and logging back in may help. If you have stale locks, remove ~/.gconf*/*lock. Perhaps the problem is that you attempted to use GConf from two machines at once, and ORBit still has its default configuration that prevents remote CORBA connections - put "ORBIIOPIPv4=1" in /etc/orbitrc. As always, check the user.* syslog for details on problems gconfd encountered. There can only be one gconfd per home directory, and it must own a lockfile in ~/.gconfd and also lockfiles in individual storage locations such as ~/.gconf
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm audio cdrom dialout floppy plugdev scanner vboxusers video

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Upstream issue showing "RESOLVED FIXED" on 2013-09-29
Closing as fix will now be in most if not all supported Ubuntu versions