Installing Mist after I already had Geth

Question

I already had geth installed and Rinkeby testnet synced. After that, I wanted to see how Mist works and downloaded Mist ( 36.7 MB Mist-linux64-0-9-0.deb).

When launched Mist and choose Rinkeby test net, synchronization started again from block 0. Could there have been a way for me to use already downloaded blockchain with geth.

Secondary questions: Also, if I install Mist, do I need to install Ethereum Wallet also? Is it already included with Mist? If geth is included in Mist, but I had geth installed previously, could that be a problem in future?

Answer 1

If you already have an instance of geth running Mist/Ethereum Wallet can connect to it, but you have to indicate them the IPC endpoint.

./ethereumwallet --rpc <<datadir>>/geth.ipc

The correct path is show when geth is launched

INFO [09-02|01:12:10] IPC endpoint opened: /home/user/data/geth.ipc 
INFO [09-02|01:12:10] HTTP endpoint opened: http://127.0.0.1:8545 
INFO [09-02|01:12:10] WebSocket endpoint opened: ws://127.0.0.1:8546 

To launch Mist if you have EthereumWallet (-m wallet if you have Mist)

./ethereumwallet -m mist

You can look for more options with ./ethereumwallet --help.