I've found a dbus script in LFS book, trimmed it a bit, now I am able to startx. But trying to shutdown or reboot from GNOME only freezes X, logout option is fine. There is no .serverauth‎, "waiting for X server to shut down gnome-settings-daemon: Fatal IO error 35 (resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0", gnome-settings-daemon is installed, I believe I am still missing something since I was installing GNOME as package by package.
When logged in as a regular user, there is no restart/shutdown option at all. Mitt