Session management error: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported

Question

The title is the first error that has sent me on a mission to fix things.

Motivation: I was trying to install the new Enthought Python Distribution -- when the error above first showed up. The install finished -- and looked like there were a few more times it flagged dcopserver problems:

• Please check that "dcopserver" program is running!
• Could not read network connection list: ~/home/user/.DCOPserver_host__0

When running ipython from the distribution, it claims that readline (the ability to up arrow in history or tab-complete) is not available for my system. It is though -- if I run the ipython that's sitting in /usr/bin/ipython all readline features work perfectly. So, I tried to fix the install by trying to fix what I thought could be causing the problems.

Bad things that are happening that I want to be fixed:

• When restarting I get the error: Could not update ICEauthority file /home/username/.ICEauthority.
• ipython readline doesn't work with Enthought's ipython

Things I have tried:

• changed the owner of my ~/.ICEauthority to be me.
• changed the owner of home directory (and all nested files and folders) to be me
• double checked that /var/lib/gdm was owned by Gnome (yep)
• attempted to reinstall DCOP, kbuildsycoca stuff (fail)
• I've removed nautilus; rebooted; reinstalled; rebooted; removed ubuntu-desktop; rebooted; reinstalled; rebooted.

Any suggestions on how to fix the Bad Things that are happening would be greatly appreciated!

Computer: Ubuntu 10.04 x86

Solution

What fixed this Session error business -- upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10.

What fixed the problems I had with the readline python errors in the Enthought Python Distribution: getting the 64 bit distro.

Everything worked as expected after those two things were taken care of.