hello!
leaving the computer on, i came back and realised that my computer had shut itself down. so i restarted it, and went through and "checked and fixed" errors that were on my pc (stuff didn't unmount) (i think).. anyway, i thought this was weird but again left my computer, came back about 20minutes later to see the screen saver on, i decided it was all going to be ok this time, but i came back around 5-10minutes later and it had turned of... it doesn't "shut down" because it doesn't unmount. it just turns my pc off... any way this could be fixed? anything anyone could suggest? this is my second day of linux, so i'm pretty stuck, i've gone through most of the confs in gnome and can't find any settings "turn my computer off if it doesn't look like i'm comming back in the next 30minutes"

any help would be appreciated!

i was trying to write a witty and helpful reply but i got bored so,

check your bios for weird things like shutting down at a certain temperature, check you log files (any services b0rked for any reason?) etc etc. i have heard never of this before but it makes a change from people asking why it _wont_ shut down

A friend of mine running RedHat9 had a problem very similar, except his computer would restart at random times. He never really figured out what was the problem, but he had it narrowed down to it being the motherboard, the processor, or the bios. If windows is also installed on your box, try booting into windows and see if anything strange happens there. If so, you could be looking at a hardware problem.

i considered hardware, and have done exactlly what you have said, i let my computer sit in windows for a while (a few hours) and nothing out of the ordinary happened..

is there a way (f linux boots straight into gnome) to drop to the terminal? just so i can test if it may be gnome causing this problem??

You could switch to a virtual terminal <ALT>+<CTRL>+<F1>, login as root and type "teleinit 3", this will switch you to text mode.