Tracker error: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY

[azmeuk (Éloi Rivard)]

I am running a server without a graphical interface on debian 10. I have installed the netatalk service that is able to launch a tracker daemon to index files. So far things seem to go fine as I can see tracker running:

$ ps aux | grep tracker
root       605 69.5  5.7 736656 228444 ?       RNl  15:36   7:18 /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
root       698  0.0  0.5 509664 20340 ?        Sl   15:36   0:00 /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-store
root       707  0.0  0.5 509924 22552 ?        SNl  15:36   0:00 /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-apps

However, when I am trying to interact with the tracker instance I get this error message:

$ sudo tracker status
Could not establish a connection to Tracker: Failed to load SPARQL backend: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY

Do you have a clue about what I am doing wrong?

Note: I posted a more netatalk-focused ticket on serverfault, if you need more context.

Thanks for your help.

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

The error message is not very helpful here. The cause is that DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is not set in your shell environment.

The Netatalk docs you linked to give an example of creating a .tracker_profile script and sourcing it into your current shell session. That would set the bus address if it’s working correctly.

What happens if you type echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS in your shell?