I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a friend's desktop PC (trying to get him 'converted'). The funny thing is, shutdown doesn't work. I've heard of this issue being present on some laptops where you need to add in menu.lst, but what could cause the error on a desktop? Compiz is not enabled, and it uses an onboard graphics card (nothing from AMD / nVidia). doesn't work either. What happens is that on choosing to shutdown, the screen goes black, but hard disk, CPU, and monitor lights stay on (so that's not a shutdown).

I searched up about this issue online and found a possible solution which says that you need to to . That didn't work out either. What else could possibly be the problem?

Check
#sudo serviceconfig

That gives a 'command not found' error.

Try booting to recovery mode. After booting to recovery mode try running:
If it shuts down ok from recovery mode, then it may be an ACPI related problem. See this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....20/+bug/42160
That is an old bug report, but you could try editing grub's menu.lst and add acpi=force to the kernel line for booting Ubuntu. See if that works.

did you try "sudo halt" ?

That worked! Thanks for the help. (The computer, at my friend's place which was affected, is an old computer - so maybe that's what caused this problem.)

That didn't work either...before I tried what tommcd said, that is.