For the record - and in case somebody falls into the same trap: I found the culprit: live-coniig handles parts of the boot process when running from a live image. That program is a decade old and has a strange idea on autologon and Xorg. If "autologin" is not explictly disabled, Xorg is started early in the boot process, bypassing sysv. When sysv later starts tdm it thinks X is not running which results in some demons started again which results in utter chaos. So to prevent this disable autologin: LIVE_CONFIG_CMDLINE="live-config.noautologin live-config.debug" Note: If tdm was configurd to autologon, it will still autologon when booted from the iso. Nik -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...