Hooking GNOME (and GDM) into initrd

Question

Hello, Arch users!
My name is Kenny Strawn. I'm sure you've seen me on LinuxQuestions.org, but I haven't been getting much help there with my issues with Arch, so I decided to take it here where, hopefully, it will get more attention.
My problem is this: I was able to make a custom Arch installation from Ubuntu by unsquashfs-ing the Arch CD image directly to an external hard drive (and its mount point), chrooting into the drive to install my needed/wanted packages (such as GNOME, GDM, Shotwell, LibreOffice, Screenlets, Rhythmbox, and others), rebuilding the initrd (which involved passing hooks to a config file, which is [hopefully] what I need to do to get GDM to start), and installing/updating GRUB to the SimpleTech 500GB external drive. I did have a problem getting Arch to boot, but hopefully I got that fixed by rebuilding the initrd.
Here's my problem: I can't get GDM to start, even if dbus is running. The error message is something like:
***(gdm-binary)***: /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
Just what hooks do I need to pass to mkinitcpio to get D-Bus, GDM, and GNOME to run at startup? So far, I haven't gotten any help on LQ with this issue. I certainly know Linux, but am new to Arch.

Answer 1

As eldragon said, dbus and gdm can both be simply added to the Daemons towards the end of /etc/rc.conf
Or you could set up ~/.xinitrc and /etc/inittab and have gdm start that way.   dbus will always need to be a daemon in rc.conf though.
Arch is a little different than a number of distros in that it uses the BSD style init system.   You should really read over the beginners guide, so you have an understanding of how the basic system is laid out.