# D-Bus

D-Bus is a message bus system that provides an easy way for inter-process communication. It consists of a daemon, which can be run both system-wide and for each user session, and a set of libraries to allow applications to use D-Bus.

## Installation

D-Bus is enabled automatically when using systemd because dbus is a dependency of systemd.

## Starting the user session

gnome-session, startkde and startxfce4 will start a D-Bus session automatically if one is not already running. The skeleton file for `~/.xinitrc` (`/etc/skel/.xinitrc`from xorg-xinit) will do the same. Make sure that your `~/.xinitrc` is based on the skeleton file `/etc/skel/.xinitrc`.

## Debugging

d-feet is an easy to use D-Bus debugger GUI tool. D-Feet can be used to inspect D-Bus interfaces of running programs and invoke methods on those interfaces. See its homepage for more info.

## See also

- D-Bus page at freedesktop.org
- Introduction to D-Bus on freedesktop.org

Category:

- Daemons and system services