When I run services-admin (from either command line or System > Administration > Services) I get a window with about 8 services. It's obvious that it's not all of them. In the help to this utility ("getting started") I can see what I was initially expecting, a full list of services, but it seems ot be an old screenshot. The problem is that there are services running which I want to turn off (printing, RAID, LVM etc) and this services-admin utility doesn't help at all (I don't want to go to rc.d and delete them manually, cause I'm not sure what is what).

What are you trying to accomplish? Smaller footprint? Faster system? I'm not sure for example that it's a good idea to turn off LVM. Perhaps you want to look at Gentoo. Gentoo is intended for highly tuned specific purpose applications. It's not for the faint of heart or for someone with limited Linux exposure.

Personally I got rid of evems, lvm mdadm, and mdadm-raid I see no use to them for my desktop pc. The kernel knows how to handle the file systems, and I know how to partition. My thruput went up now w/hdparm too. Also I dont use raid. I dont like un-necessary services.

Old Foie -- Ubuntu doesn't give much control to the user with regards to services. Certainly less than SuSE did. How would one go about removing services like these?

sudo apt-get install bum
With bum you can disable any service on your system.

I simply removed them from the /etc/init.d directory and put them into another folder owned by root.

You see, for me, even editing the services with BUM for run levels 1 thru 6 didn't stop the lvm, evm and raid stuff from loading. I don't know why to be honest, and their are other tools too in ubuntu to do this and they just didnt work for me.

I'm still baffled as to "why" when I made my own kernel, lvm and evm and raid tools totally stop me from accessing hard drives other than the hda.

I don't use lvm or the evm other than the default install. Those items are not in slackware which I use primarily, so my experience on them is NULL. I know they are in suse, but I only played with that for a little while, and never got into using them their either. So I never did anything to tweak them, and I cannot find any help on this..ubuntu forums, here, nowhere.

I'd just like to learn how one compile a kernel for this distro and not break lvm or evms? I'm not being wise in that comment, but something isn't right. It doesnt' appear that anything else is broken for me tho. I get DRI fantastically.

I have to use a 2.6.17 series kernel or higher for my pc as the kernel team has fixes in their that really work well for my nforce motherboard IDE ports.

here is kernel config for my 2.6.18 kernel,
And here is error messages in 'dmesg' when I boot up and ubuntu decides not to let me access my hard drives:

This is why I just disabled these daemons, I need my hard drives

Any thoughts are appreciated, I'd like to learn instead of band aid repairing.

This is pure guess but perhaps removing those pieces broke some symbolic links in a miscellaneous .conf file that was built assuming the existence of LVM and etc.

The daemons were running when I configured, made and installed the new kernel with above config so I don't think that's it.

I turned them off when I realized that they were the daemons that decided in their infinite wisdom to deny me access to my drives. Knowing that they are not a requirement for a linux installation on IDE hard drives, and linux not being initially installed onto an LVM I got rid of them.