Fix: Fail running Firefox on FreeBSD without D-Bus running

This weekend I replaced Kubuntu 16.04 with FreeBSD 12 on an old HP laptop. I came across with lots of problems, but mainly because I wanted to have some experiences with UEFI and GPT.

Anyway, currently the laptop is running FreeBSD 12-current with i3 as the windows manager. After Firefox was installed, I ran it from the menu (rofi) and nothing appeared. So I ran it from a terminal instead. Here was the output:

According to this blog post, a solution is to generate the machine-id file as the following:

Once it’s done Firefox should be launched fine. This works, though I’m not sure if there’s any difference between putting machine-id in /etc/ or /var/lib/dbus/machine-id.

Credit: <a href=“http://www.torkwrench.com/2011/12/16/d-bus-library-appears-to-be-incorrectly-set-up-failed-to-read-machine-uuid-failed-to-open-varlibdbusmachine-id/>D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open “/var/lib/dbus/machine-id”