D-Bus

D-Bus is Article description::an interprocess communication (IPC) system for software applications. Software makes use of D-Bus to communicate information between services.

USE flags
Portage knows the global  USE flag for enabling support for D-Bus in other packages. Enabling this flag will pull in automatically. This is the default for desktop profiles:

Emerge
After setting the  global USE flag be sure to update the system using the   option:

Files
The main configuration files include:


 * for the system bus
 * for the session bus

OpenRC
After configuration step, start D-Bus with:

To start D-Bus at boot time, add it the default run level:

Usage
Some useful commands include:


 * - To monitor the activities in the system bus.
 * - To monitor the activities in the session bus.
 * - To send a message. See the dbus-send man page for more information.

To shutdown and reboot as a regular user when using consolekit:

To shutdown and reboot as a regular user when using elogind:

Changing the last argument to boolean:true should make polkit interactively ask the user for authentication credentials if it needs to.

Troubleshooting
Use the command to monitor the buses. Errors are also redirected to the syslog.

External resources

 * Introduction to D-Bus (freedesktop.org)
 * D-Bus tutorial (freedesktop.org)
 * D-Bus (Arch Wiki)