I gave my iMac G3 to my great-grandmother for her birthday, (she's 99) so she could play games on it, (like gweled, iango, etc). Anyway, I told her she could just push the button on the front to turn it on, and to turn it off. This makes the computer really simple to use, and since this is her first computer simplicity is good. Anyway, I found out that the computer is shutting down improperly, which seems bad. No damage has been done, since she's not really writing files to the drive at all, and I turned off all the background services, so they aren't really writing anything either. How can I make the computer properly shutdown when she presses the button on the front??

Is she holding the power button until the machine goes off, or just pressing it once? What exactly does it do when she hits the button?

You really want to avoid improper shutdowns, as there is always something going on in the background, even if services have been disabled and she isn't actively working on any files. If the computer is on, there are open files that the system is actively reading and writing, and an improper shutdown can corrupt any of those.

For that matter, what filesystem are you using? A more robust filesystem can go a long way to avoiding file corruption.

Yeah, it happens if you just tap the power button (e.g. less than a second). Its an EXT3 filesystem, so at least it should be good there. I was thinking of something along the lines of maybe pmud or pbbutton (unfortunately I briefly tried all those programs, and nothing changed)

Yeah, it looks like it got corrupted. I am going to go and redo the whole thing. Does anyone have any ideas as to how to make the thing work properly this time around, so I don't end up redoing it again... I noticed on the kernel startup messages, that it seems to be mapping that button to something like /dev/virtual7. (I am going from memory here so I don't know for sure.) Is it possible to have that button execute the halt command when pressed?