I have been having fits with this. I build all the gnustep stuff from source and it goes fine, but apps don't work right because gpbs isn't running. The output of: gpbs --verbose --no-fork is:
2012-10-21 15:58:58.568 gpbs[8836] <PasteboardObject: 0x2274f88> NSGeneralPboard declare types '(NSStringPboardType)' version 1 on <NSPasteboard: 0x2295318> NSGeneralPboard 0x2274f88 for <XPbOwner: 0x2293588>
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter) Major opcode of failed request: 17 (X_GetAtomName) Atom id in failed request: 0x23af6b0 Serial number of failed request: 57 Current serial number in output stream: 57