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I'm finding that a number of fairly essential daemons and programs are not starting up at boot time, most of the time. This is a pretty fresh (a few weeks old) install of 10.10 on an Acer Aspire 5742 laptop.

My uneducated guess is that something is preventing dbus from starting, and that this dominoes everything else. The components that I've noticed not working include gdm/xorg.

When this happens, there are no messages logged to /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, etc. Presumably this is because syslog depends on dbus to deliver its messages.

At this point dmesg doesn't show anything obviously unusual.

So when this happens, my system boots into a console. ps -ef | grep dbus shows that dbus is not running.

When I start dbus, via sudo /etc/init.d/dbus start, gdm comes up and I can log in normally. Syslog — which is running — seems to need a restart (sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart) at this point before it will start logging anything.

During problematic boots, I am seeing some messages to the effect that repeated efforts to start statd failed. I don't think there's anything else unusual in there, though I'm not sure how to check it out in detail because it doesn't get logged.

The messages about statd are not present in /var/log.

How can I troubleshoot this?

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dbus should start on "local-filesystems", so maybe there is a problem there. When this problem happens, can you post the output of dmesg, cat /proc/mounts, ls -l /var/run/dbus,  initctl list and cat /etc/fstab? – arrange Mar 14 '11 at 20:38
@arrange: Will do. May take a while though — I'm loathe to interrupt my work with another reboot. – intuited Mar 14 '11 at 21:51
This question appears to be abandoned and unanswered, could you perhaps add more detail to your question? If you are experiencing a similar issue please ask a new question with details pertaining to your problem. If you feel this question is not abandoned, then please flag explaining that (as well as editing your question with any details you have). – jrg♦ Jan 26 '12 at 2:04

closed as too localized by jrg♦, Jorge Castro, Marco Ceppi♦ Jan 26 '12 at 2:38

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