great, thanks re pids, good.

Here's the deal with runlevels, the best is to ignore what ubuntu tells you, and if you still can, set inittab to default start x in 3, 4 or 5.

That way, you can have the dm not start in 2, which makes procedures like this 10 times easier, and it's why starting a gui desktop that is run by non free driver blobs that can fail, or xorg drivers that can, and do, fail, is such a terrible decision by debian/ubuntu. Old default used to be 3 for most, 5 for x/desktop, that's how redhat did it, and it was the right way.

To keep in line with standard debian defaults, I have everything start at 2 but the desktop, which starts at 3.

this is from the arch wiki on itittab.

Then you use something to change mdm's default start level to 3, 4, 5, matching what you changed it to above. I like 3, because it's one more than 2, easy.
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no /etc/inittab, I was afraid of that, I think ubuntu has switched to upstart now, not sure.

No idea how to change that stuff then.

Just out of curiousity, is there: /etc/init.d/mdm

as a real file? or a symbolic link to somewhere? if so, where?
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Yes, it's a real file, not a symlink to anything.
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odd, no idea how they are starting ubuntu then in this case.

inittab has always sort of told the system what to do in terms of starting the desktop and virtual terminals, along with a bunch of other things, so I have no idea what ubuntu is now doing instead.

I will assume this is partly upstart in action, the new init type startup manager, sort of, but I can't give any details, not having read much on it, and having never seen it.

However good info re mdm and all that, I didn't even know that gnome 2 had been forked.

So there's almost certainly some file or setting somewhere that contains that respawn -daemon command for mdm, and that's what is causing the restart.

If you really want, you can do this, as root, do:

grep -sRn mdm /etc/*

and see if it spits out any files. If you get a bunch of /etc/rc... then filter it with:

grep -sRn mdm /etc/* | grep -Ev '(/etc/rc|/etc/init.d/mdm)'

You're looking for a line that has something like a -daemon command with mdm in the line.
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upstart.ubuntu.com/

Here's the source of your problem, this is ubuntu issue, that is, it's an upstart issue, not a mint issue, so we can drop mint from this equation.



This is precisely the issue, a service is being respawned when it died unexpectedly, ie, when it was turned off somehow, which is idiotic, but there it is. So this is almost certainly the cause of the mdm / mate respawning which in turn is then breaking the nvidia install.

Someone who uses mate and upstart is going to have to look into this more deeply, and then find the actual way to make that undesired behavior not happen in terms of scriptable programming.
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