D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up

Recently I add to install firefox on top of a bare bones SL6 VM (e.g. installed with the minimal package set) and upon launching the browser I got this error:

$ firefox 
process 12606: D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such file or directory
See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
  D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Aborted

turns out that the culprit is dbus which needs the service messagebus running but it has not been started by default, so issuing this makes the error go away:

# /etc/init.d/messagebus start

now Firefox will start as expectd.