Comment 21 for bug 56426

I'm pretty sure the Serivces dialog just runs the init.d script. I'm not proposing to change the Services dialog at all; Merely change /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon to make "start" and "stop" do just that. Then the Services dialog would function as normal instead of being ignored.

Avahi-daemon *is* a special case in it's current state because it is the only "service" that has a special checkbox in the System->Administration->Networking "General" tab required to make it work. There are many many bug reports about this so, obviously, having a special case for avahi-daemon is too obscure.

The user does not care if it is started by dbus or by a hampster running on a wheel, the user only knows that it doesn't start the way every other service appears to.