Hi,
I spent a couple of minutes trying to configure my DNS things using linuxconf.
When I was tired I tried to powerdown my system.
Usually afther logging out I had a menu asking "do you want to poweroff"? Really want ?
Now I don't have this menu any more, I go back to the "username/password" menu.
So I cannot powerdown directly from the KDE screen, I must go to the alt/ctrl/F1 ascii terminal, login and "init 0".
How to make the things work fine again ?

Do you have autologin enable in your boot config... what distro are you using by the way? As I recall, using autologin caused me some problems as far as powering down and such goes.

(This was on Mandrake) If I initially logged in as user *blah* then I would get the nice KDE dragon thingy when I requested a shutdown. If I auto-logged in then I would not get this.

I do think, though, that you can always just run the command halt or 'shutdown now' from an x-term without having to switch to console mode. So that would save you a step anyway. I believe at one poinit when I was using Slack 9 I just put a little desktop link to run the shutdown command to avoid having to open a terminal. Kinda ghetto, but it worked. And it's safe because you need root's password to use it; (so no danger of accidentally shutting down when you're in the middle of something)

Thanks, Jonathan.

if u are using kde, go to the control center: -> System adminsitration -> Login Manager -> Sessions and change the value for Allow Shutdown.

Thanks, Khtse
oops!
I just had a kernel panic with my Belkin Wifi devices, reboot did not help.
So I installed everything from scratch.
This also happened to solve my first problem.
So everything works fine now.
Regards
Zorba