My first brush with systemd

[Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com>]

The situation:
I need to reinstall tdm-trinity.  It's a long saga.  I am getting the 
following.  The left hand edge is missing (on the display so on my copy) and 
I can't see the text very well, so I may have miscopied.  But here it is, for 
what it is worth:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# aptitude reinstall tdm-trinity

up tdm-trinity 94:14.0.1~pre21-0debian8.0.0.2~a)...
top-daemon:pid value must be a number greater than 0
start-stop-daemon --help for more information

----------------------------------------
I then tried 
# dpkg-reconfigure tdm-trinity

I got the following error message, left hand edge missing again:
------------------------------------------

064319]systemd-default-display-manager-generator[1316]:/lib/systemd/system/tdm.service 
is not a systemd unit. we disable the systemd enabled display manager
top-daemon:pid value must be a number greater than 0
start-stop-daemon --help for more information
-----------------------------------------------------------

Any useful suggestions for what I could try?  In my book, chuck systemd would 
not count as useful.  Though it has crossed my mind. :-(

Thanks.

Lisi