Mint LXDE 12 will not shut down

[tpprynn]

I've recently bought quite an old Thinkpad, a T22 from 2001 - 900mhz, 20gb, 256mb. It came with XP on though it was designed for Windows 98 and 2000 according to a sticker on it, and as it was XP was a bit slow. New ram arriving this week.

I've tried a few distros on it, restricted to what I have lying around for the moment, knowing well which ones not to bother with. Debian 6 and Ubuntu 9.04 worked very well with one showstopper each***. Mint 9 Gnome seemed to need more speed than the laptop has but was still okay. I had a possibly faulty Mint 12 LXDE CD which I let do its thing for four hours at the installation stage before abandoning this. I now have Mint 11 LXDE installed and all is well except that it will not shut down. It begins to but then hangs and I have to press the power button, as nothing else responds. I have googled this to no avail. What is likely to be the problem? Any file I can meddle with?

I will burn another Mint 12 LXDE CD later but this computer isn't going online much if at all and ideally I wouldn't bother for now if anyone can help 11 shut down.

Thanks.

***Audio issue with Debian, and the fact of 9.04 being obsolete and without codecs, but both were Gnome 2 working very well on an aged computer

[tpprynn]

Later in the day now and I have burnt a second attempt at the CD and installed Mint LXDE 12. I also checked the CD was without errors.

I'm very pleased with 12, it seems tidied up in a few places, uses less memory and feels smoother overall - but, it has the same fault for me in that it doesn't shut down properly. It begins to, as 11 did, and then stops about a second before it would normally go off as it had with Gnome 2 distros. So this seems to be something to do with how it interacts with my laptop's hardware doesn't it? Is this anything to do with acpi? Or does LXDE have its own procedure for shutdown? I did try sudo reboot in the terminal with the same result of hanging though.

I will ask about this on the Thinkpad forum too as there is a small Linux-enthusiastic section.

(I also installed Fluxbox to see if the problem still occured when using that, but when I log out to choose Fluxbox there is no button that I see that lets me log back in again. Just two boxes, one for Desktop, one for language, and the Quit button.)

Thanks for any ideas.

[tpprynn]

After much googling I find now that

sudo shutdown -h now

works. How can I assign this to the shutdown process' normal method. It had not been 'halting' (-h) whatever the difference is there!

Somewhere in LXDE I gather there is a script triggered by the power button or the longer key process or something currently set to

sudo shutdown

with no parameters?

Thanks.

[seppalta]

The shutdown exec for LXDE is <b>Exec=lxde-logout</b>. Desktop file(s) for shutdown should be in /usr/shares/applications. Change NoDisplay=true to NoDisplay=false and identify a Category to put shutdown in the menu. Mint 12 has a gtk-logout-helper in /usr/lib/indicator-session. http://douwil7.100webspace.net/linux/Tuning.html

[tpprynn]

Thanks for your input on both this and the LXDE forum Seppalta. I have moved to Xubuntu 12.04 for now but knowing my habits I will be able to use your information some time soon.

[JohnYate]

Hi, I've had the "Not closing down" bug a bit with main release big Gnome LinuxMint, and put it down to lack of available memory to administer the coup de grace on the processes. Have you resolved the problem yet ?
It has been a less frequent, almost non-existent problem with installed LXDE, but then I'm using a big extravagant machine with 384MB of RAM, all of 50% more memory than the minimum recommended. Have you failed to close down an inactive web-browser (Mozilla etc) process, perhaps, before hitting the shutdown menu.
I used to use the "halt" command to shut down LXDE before I worked out how to get the desktop and installation running on the live disk by typing "sudo lxdm" at the terminal command line, and the halts didn't always work then, leaving me with an inaccessible process - nothing to do but press the big red button. The "logout" button gives you a menu containing a choice of quietening down actions, from actual "logout" which leaves the machine unstoppable, to "hibernate"s - which work, and shutdowns, which also work in the available memory.