I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and attempting to run services via start,stop, status and I get the corresponding error below. I've googled around but everything is like 2-3 years old and unanswered.

status: Unable to connect to system bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory

Solution 1:

D'oh, alright I figured it out... dbus isn't installed for some reason although services were working before..? Not sure what happened, anyways sudo apt-get install dbus worked.