under 10.3 suse, I was able to run kmail on my desktop from my laptop on the same network. Now, using an up-to-date suse 11.1 and kde 4.1, I am no longer able. I get the message: "Cannot find the D-Bus session server", when I try to start kmail remotely. Other KDE apps do work. I use "ssl -X tuck@172.20.7.21 kmail" to activate. Or just, "ssl -l tuck 172.20.7.21", and do the "export DISPLAY, etc", then "kmail". same result.
Sorry if this should be posted elsewhere. I dont know whether it is a kmail or dbus issue.
Tnx for any help. (If this is a known bug, is it solved on kde 4.3?)
Tuck Hartshorn

Try wrapping the command as follows: dbus-launch kmail

ssh -Y tuck@172.20.7.21 'dbus-launch kmail'
Wonderful--Wunderbar--that work's just fine. Will I need to do this from now on or is it something likely to be fixed in the future?
Tnx Tuck

There's the same problem with Dolphin (as far as I know) and I think it isn't corrected by now. Maybe search for it at http://bugs.kde.org and look if there's a bug reported for it and if a developer wrote something about it. And if your topic is solved, could you mark it as solved by pressing the green hook at the post which solved your problem, please?

Unfortunately I do not now if a solution exists at this time, but it will likely be solved through the automatic creation of a D-Bus session bus, etc. if not present by KDE applications.

I have a similar problem. I am trying to remotely launch kmail on a kde4 system from a kde3 system.

Just trying a launch yields:
> kmail
<unknown program name>(17527)/: Cannot find the D-Bus session server

while dbus-launching yields
dbus-launch kmail
kmail: cannot connect to X server
<unknown program name>(17529)/: Communication problem with "kmail" , it probably crashed.
Error message was: "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown" : " "The name org.kde.kmail was not provided by any .service files" "

probably this is a dcop/dbus kde3/kde4 incompatibility, but is there a workaround?

this seems to be an ipv4 vs. ipv6 problem

bcooksley wrote:Unfortunately I do not now if a solution exists at this time, but it will likely be solved through the automatic creation of a D-Bus session bus, etc. if not present by KDE applications.

The problem is that the automatic starting does not happen because the code doing that gets hints that there is already one running.

Because of the X forwarding, the application starting up sees the D-Bus address property of the session running the X server.
But this D-Bus bus is not reachable for the remote application because it only allows local connects (using Unix domain sockets).

There have been discussion on how to forward the D-Bus connection similar to the X forwarding itself, but I don't think there has been any work on this yet.
So at the moment running a D-Bus bus on the remote system is the best possible solution.

Cheers,
_