[Ethereum] How to connect geth client ( runing Ropsten testnet) with Mist on top of that without it’s own geth node

Move your ~/.ethereum wallet to a different location (if you already have one so as not to mess up your live stuff), take off the --datadir on your geth line, re-run everything, and it should work. ~/.ethereum is hard coded in Mist. (for now?)

https://github.com/ethereum/mist/blob/v0.3.8/modules/ipc/getIpcPath.js

module.exports = function() {
    var p = require('path');
    var path = global.path.HOME;

    if(process.platform === 'darwin')
        path += '/Library/Ethereum/geth.ipc';

    if(process.platform === 'freebsd' ||
       process.platform === 'linux' ||
       process.platform === 'sunos')
        path += '/.ethereum/geth.ipc';

    if(process.platform === 'win32')
        path = '\\\\.\\pipe\\geth.ipc';

    console.log('CONNECT to IPC PATH: '+ path);
    return path;
};

Alternatively, you can have just have the .ipc file in the right place that Mist is looking for it (specify an IPC file in the ~/.ethereum directory from geth and a datadir some other place), but to me this seems more complicated.

I would highly recommend taking a look at Mix if you haven't already and following this tutorial.

It looks like your block is not being mined and you have 0 peers in your network. Here is a private chain boot command I used in an older version of geth (note the --mine and --max_peers 2 flags):

geth --genesis ./private_env/genesis.json --datadir ./private_chain --rpc --rpcport 2060 --networkid 257291 --unlock primary --nodiscover --mine --minerthreads 8 --maxpeers 2 --unlock 0 --password ./private_env/password.txt > ./log.txt 2>&1

The genesis block was pre-seeded following this guide.

But really... no need to get this down and dirty these days unless you want to. Mix is great!