Gnome desktop gives the logout/switch user/shutdown/restart option. I use KDE because I prefer not to have lots of windows open at any one time- and my wife is a windows user so will not need to adjust too much to use Linux.

KDE only allows logout ie end current session- I can choose whether or not to confirm but that's all.

Tried settings-kde components- offer shutdown options, it made no difference.

Looked at control-system administration-login manager- shutdown. This reads "/sbin/halt" so I wonder whether a different entry here might produce the desired result.

Although debian logs in and out much more quickly than windows it would be good to keep user sessions running. I haven't been able to locate this issue by searching LQ- but has anyone else dealt with it?

Sounds like a problem with the way KDE is integrated with GDM; you can try switching the display manager to KDM.
First, make sure that the kdm package is installed, then run "dpkg-reconfigure kdm" as root and set kdm as the default display manager.

If you use KDM as described above, you will get the shutdown/reboot options in KDE. I am not sure how using KDM will affect the shutdown/reboot options in GNOME, but in past releases, they would not be available unless you were using GDM. As for GNOME opening multiple windows whenever you run the file manager, you can disable this by doing Nautilus -> Edit -> Preferences -> Behaviour -> Always Open in Browser Window.

I use GDM with KDE, mainly because when you install lenny gdm is what you get. I don't like Gnome so I chose the options in GDM so that on startup it fires up KDE and logs me in. It's in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf I think. The logout function in KDE works ok and you need not know Gnome exists hurrah

Tony Sumner

You will get the logout option, but you will not get the option to restart or shutdown the computer from within KDE if you use GDM rather than KDM.

Not so; I do.

Tony Sumner

I was confused by the fact that I was able to run kde- probably due to a dependency loaded when I got something else from the k-suite. Kdm was not installed and it only took a minute to sort it out- thanks for helping me out on this one!-Phil

Debian Lenny for AMD64 has one more issue.When i shutdown computer i can see some ugly warning messages like disk is not shut down properly,but when I turn on computer later everything works fine.
Why is that happening ?