how do i give a normal user permission to halt (or reboot) the system. as far as i remember in redhats gnome i had a possibility to shut down the system. here under debian i can do it only as root.

btw halting system doesn't turn off my computer. i have to do it manually. under redhat it turned it off after halting.

i believe you sometimes need to have apm (advanced power management) enabled for the computer to physically turn off after shutting down.

as far as having users hatl or reboot the system, why would you want to do that? if anyone cracks your system, they can just shut it down. is it that difficult to switch to root to reboot?

if you really have to do it, you can chown/chmod your reboot and shutdown scripts. there are probably a lot of other ways to do it, too.

I went through both these issues last week.

Synaptical is I'm sure perfectly correct in what he says re halt/reboot scripts, but there is a config file for gdm if you are using that as a display manager (you do mention gnome) If you are using something else (eg kdm) then there may be something equivalent.

The file is /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

There is a line in there like this:

# The system menu requires the root password for all options
SecureSystemMenu=false

Mine is configured not to require a password.

I require apm for automatic shutdown. I lost this ability when I did a bit update recently, but I just had to add apm into my modules list and it came back again.