dbus failure to connect to the session bus

[Shawn Rutledge]

Whenever I try to connect to the dbus "session" daemon outside of X,
it doesn't work.  e.g.

/usr/bin/dbus-send --session --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000
--type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus
org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

Failed to open connection to session message bus: dbus-launch failed
to autolaunch D-Bus session: Autolaunch requested, but X11 support not
compiled in.
Cannot continue.

I can see the daemon is running:

[om-gta01][12:18:54 AM] ps aux | grep dbus
44        1082  0.0  0.5   2252   756 ?        Ss   00:17   0:00
/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system
root      1425  2.7  0.6   2252   820 ?        Ss   00:37   0:00
/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 7 --session

so I don't understand why the same user (root) would not be able to
connect to the same daemon from a different shell.