Ubuntu – How to disable an upstart service in ubuntu 10.10

bootUbuntuupstart

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:

# chkconfig --list
acpi-support              0:off  1:off  2:on   3:on   4:on   5:on   6:off
acpid                     0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
alsa-mixer-save           0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
anacron                   0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
apache2                   0:off  1:off  2:on   3:on   4:on   5:on   6:off
apparmor                  0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off  S:on 
apport                    0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
atd                       0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
.... and so on ....

You can enable / disable services for specific run-levels (or just turn them on and off) with:

# chkconfig -s <service> <state/runlevels>

for example:

# chkconfig -s gdm off

to turn it off completely,

# chkconfig -s gdm on

to turn it on with the defaultsm or

# chkconfig -s gdm 34

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:

/usr/sbin/gdm

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:

[ ! -f /etc/X11/default-display-manager -o "$(cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager 2>/dev/null)" = "/usr/sbin/gdm" ] || { stop; exit 0; }

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"

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