Hi,

I'm writing in today because my Lenny installation has decided to deny me the right to shutdown the machine. What happens is the shutdown button on my panel is grayed out, and there are no 'Shutdown,' 'Restart,' etc options in the 'System' menu (I'm using Gnome).

It's been doing this for about a week, and I can't remember what exactly I was doing before this happened. I'm not sure if I updated or not...the only real power-using I've done recently is set up a 32-bit chroot, that's about it.

I've been shutting down as root in a terminal, which is rather cumbersome for me. Does this sound like some sort of permissions issue? I love my current installation, and hope I don't have to reinstall...

Any advice is most welcome and appreciated!

PS - I've seen this happen when being dumped into a terminal upon boot-up, and using the 'startx' command as user, but GDM is starting with a script.

I don't know about Debian, but in Slackware you can use the setuid bit to run /sbin/halt as a normal user. Take a note of the actual /sbin/halt permissions in case it won't work and then run:

I had something like this once where there was an unstopped process running, I identified the process by executing ps from the command line and then killing the process that was causing my problem.

Well, I went ahead and checked the permissions on /sbin/halt, and users had read access, which seems correct, then I tried the setuid command, but nothing has changed, unfortunately.

And thanks for the tip on the possibility of a process causing this. I wouldn't even know what to look for if I were to try to isolate it. An interesting thing to note is that when I shutdown as root in a terminal using "shutdown now," it drops to a maintenance shell instead of going down. If I use "shutdown -h now," (with the halt argument), it works correctly. "shutdown -r now" also works okay. Also, I feel I should mention that if I log out and am sitting in front of the GDM login screen, I still cannot shutdown. In theory, all my processes should have terminated, right? Maybe I'll switch over to a virtual terminal while my user is logged out and run "ps -U root -u root -N"? That shows processes which are not owned by root, am I right?

Okay, I went ahead and ran that, and the processes that are running are:

portmap
rpc.statd
dbus-daemon
avahi-daemon (two instances)
exim4
hald
hald-addon-acpi
gdm-greeter(didn't shut that down, I know)


But here's the odd part: I started up a gnome session as root, and still couldn't shutdown graphically. What gives!

*chirp-chirp-chirp*

Anybody?

Sorry...

Well, in KDE you have a users/groups (or security) menu / module (I forgot in which one exactly it resides) where you can determine for the KDE-shutdown button who may use it. Maybe you could give a try in the depths of the Gnome menu tree...

are you a member of the powerdev group ?

http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-power-manager/

Interesting, that. Problem is, I installed Fedora on another partition, which did an SELinux relabel, which I believe borked my Debian installation.

When I attempt to start it now, it quickly halts after the "kernel alive" message, and reads:

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)


and I can't do anything further. I'd try turning SELinux off and doing another relabel, but I've uninstalled Fedora and put something else on that partition already.

Can this be fixed easily? I could always just reinstall Lenny, but it would be nice to avoid that.

Thanks!