Hi could any one tell me in FC5 how do I configure power button to restart machine when it gets pressed rather than shut down, thanks.
This may seem to be unreasonable but I have a very weird problem on my DELL inspiron 9300 notebook. When I shut it down, at very last second the HDD makes a noise that sounds like it is a power cut (e.g. the noise is the same when the machine freezes and I hold power button down for 5 seconds to turn it off), but it does not make any noise at all if I shut down from WindowsXP(I have dual boot). I suppose it is a power management issue related to kernel and other complex stuff so before I can solve the HDD noise problem I would like to press the power button to restart to windows and then shut it down normally. Any help is much appreciated.

I know Red Hat/Fedora normally rolls customizations into their kernels but normally you would recompile the kernel with acpi support and all the associated power management features. You then should be able to issue a shutdown at the prompt or from the GUI and it will turn off the way you would expect just like Windows. I would be suspicious of doing this. There may be some stability reason for Fedora not including this in their customized kernel.

I'm not that familiar with that model of laptop but usually there is a setting available in the BIOS setup that allows you to configure how the power button is used. Like you can have it shut off immediately when you press it, have a delay of 4 seconds, bump it into suspend, etc. Most systems nowadays come with the 4 second delay, while the quick press is just a reset which can be overriden by the operating system. There are other variations as well.

I maybe shouldn't even suggest this for a Fedora system, but you could download and install the latest kernel from kernel.org. The kernels available from Slackware give you good .config files to start with so you don't have to labor through the entire kernel configuration process from scratch. It may not be that great on Fedora though. Maybe someone else can verify/refute this idea? Especially someone with Red Hat/Fedora experience. I haven't touched it in years.

Last idea is to try another distribution. Different distros seem to treat hardware quite a bit differently in my experience.