I got the reply

sudo service gdm start
it shows:
gdm start/running, process 12737

sudo service gdm stop
it shows:
stop: Unknown instance: failure


sudo service --status-all
shows:
[ ? ] gdm

< Edited by kelvinyh001 :: Jan 17, 13, 13:41 >
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well at least now we know why sgfxi reports the failure, stopping gdm resulted in failure.

Now, why that is, I can't say. Is it related to cinnamon? Is it an upstart issue?

I can't say that either, not enough information.

Generally sgfxi and other scripts at least try to be accurate, ie, if it reports gdm stop failure, ideally, that means the command resulted in failure.

Sometimes sgfxi in particular has problems when certain operations result in failure but return success codes, fglrx used to have that cute 'feature', which of course made handling failures quite difficult for fglrx users.

But that's not the case here I'm glad to note, the operation is in fact failing, and sgfxi is correctly observing that failure. So the question moves to why is that command to stop gdm failing?

Since these are old and standard methods, and since so far only cinnamon plus gdm plus upstart reports a problem, I have to move the ball into your court and see if you can find out why: service gdm stop
gives an error.

I've seen various things that trigger failures, slim dm used to have that problem in certain scenarios, but I haven't seen gdm / kdm / xdm type login managers show such issues.

So since I dont' run ubuntu or upstart or gdm or cinnamon, this will be hard for me to debug for you.

Here's the sequence of debugging I'd do:

first, take a standard ubuntu with upstart and gnome/gdm.

Then go to tty 1 and issue: service gdm stop
and note the result. Did it kill gdm/gnome? if so, proceed to step two, we can now rule out upstart and gdm.

Step two is figuring out why mint cinnamon, or maybe cinnamon plus upstart plus gdm fails to stop gdm when you tell it to.

The easiest way to deal with step two is to get another mint user running the same version and desktop as you to go to tty 1 and issue the command: service gdm stop

does it kill the desktop? if it does, then it's something specific to your setup, if it doesn't, it's a general problem, not easy to solve or handle.

There's not a lot more I can do, sgfxi will take fairly strong steps to try to kill X if gdm stop fails, so if it can't kill x at all, that's an issue that is hard to solve for me.

Now, if no other ubuntu users report issues, then it looks more like a mint thing, which might make it easier to figure out, but I won't be able to figure it out since I have no access to those systems for testing/debugging, nor the time to construct such systems.

This was all working fine however for mint users, ubuntu users, debian users, and for all I know, it might still be working fine for them, but not you. So you want to see if this is a general problem or just your system, or just a handful of systems.
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ok noted thank you very much.

I will try to figure out.

In the mean time I will stay as is, and use the proprietary driver.

Thanks a lot! Have a nice day.
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ideally find a method to kill gdm as expected by telling it to stop.

If extra steps are required due to either cinnamon or upstart, I'll need to know those so I can include them, plus tests to run to see if those need to be used.

Once you can successfully and consistently kill gdm from tty 1 out of X, then we can get it resolved.
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Ok problem solved!

I re-install Linux Mint.

The first thing I do is to run sgfxi, and now Nvidia driver 313.18 is installed correctly.
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Ok, that seems to narrow it down to the packaging of the nvidia driver itself from mint/ubuntu, nothing I can do about that one, and that's an issue I've heard some reports of but nothing concrete, though it appears most ubuntu type users of sgfxi have figured out how to get around that issue.
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Yup thank you very much.
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