In 10.10 upstart is being used instead of sysvinit.
It's possible to remove annoying upstart services which you do not want by removing the appropriate file in /etc/init/blah.conf
However, this seems a heavy handed approach. How do you correctly configure upstart to be able to selectively turn these services on and off via the command line?
As a practical example, the answers listed here to turn gdm off using rcconf no longer work:
How do I prevent GDM from running at boot on Ubuntu?
Best Answer
If you look in /etc/init.d you will notice that any services that are configured through upstart are just symbolic links to /lib/init/upstart so removing them from /etc/init.d just removes the link - not the script.
If you want an interface to this you can install the
chkconfig
package (apt-get install chkconfig
) which gives a useful command line tool:You can enable / disable services for specific run-levels (or just turn them on and off) with:
for example:
to turn it off completely,
to turn it on with the defaultsm or
to only turn it on for run levels 3 and 4.
You'll usually find this command on RHEL based systems (CentOS, Fedora, etc).
UPDATE
This is specific to Ubuntu and gdm / kdm / whatever.
When gdm starts up it calls an upstart config file /etc/init/gdm.conf
This file then references /etc/X11/default-display-manager to see if it is the default display manager for the system - if it is then it starts.
The /etc/X11/default-display-manager just contains:
You can replace this with another display manager, or remove the file entirely and it won't start gdm.
A line from the /etc/init/gdm.conf file:
It's saying "If the file /etc/X11/default-display-manager doesn't exist, or if it doesn't contain
/usr/sbin/gdm
then exit"