i have trouble getting the computer ot shut off. it happens with suse and red hat, the last operating systems installed on rig. i click on shutdown, it sends terminating signal, starts the process, and then stops at power down and sounds like hard drive is shut down at this poing. when i push the power button on computer, nothing happens. i have to pull the power plug on back of computer to get it to completely shut down. is there a bios setting that needs to be set::::??????

well, found this out. when i hold the power switch in for 5 seconds, it powers down. i don,t get it, i never hat this problem before, what is my problem because i don,t have a clue.::::: red hat 9

Try loading the apm module.

Unfortunately I can't answer what the problem is, but I had a similar one so I will mention what happened.

I have a driver that is trashing my configuration files. One of the results was that when I ran shutdown -- this is really weird -- my laptop would shutdown completely, except the Monitor would stay active!

I could then shut the system off with the power switch. I never had such a thing before. The problem went away with a clean install.

Clearly, there are settings somewhere that specify what "executes' in the shutoff routines, but I don't know about these.

Hi,

I had a problem similar to basd and when I pressed the power switch the laptop would shutdown, however this happened with some distros and not with others, this indicated me that is something in the configuration scripts ( I guess ).

I'm new to Linux so I solutioned the problem with 'halt -p' in a shell terminal (RedHat 7.2). The -p switch tells the computor to really powerdown not just halt.

After testing I've put 'alias halt=alias -p' in my shell rc.

thanks for the help, may do a clean install and see what happens. when i get this problem solved, that all the i have. then back to studying Linux-rute and tutorial quide

next time you get it running - see if you can load the apm module 'modprobe apm' and then the apmd program. If it complains that you are already running ACPI then you may need to load some specific modules to get that working.

One nice thing you can do with ACPI is have it read 'events' like say your power button for example. I setup my rigs so that you need to hold the power button down for 4 seconds to take it down hard (nasty), but if I just press and release the button ACPI sees that event and starts the halt script and powers me down nicely. It's great if you have roomies or kids who inadvertantly power you off for one reason or another.