Shutdown and restart not always working - continued

[Chris G]

Well I took a look at the documentation on how this is supposed to
work and I took a look at what actually happens on xubuntu 8.10, with
the following results.

The documentation says that if HAL is installed (which it seems to be
on my systems) one should find the following:-

    In the steps below the groupname “power” is used. This is DEPENDING ON
    YOUR DISTRIBUTION.

    Your /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf should contain a section similar to this:

    <policy group="power">
      <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
      ...
    </policy>

    Add the user to the power group (root):

     gpasswd -a <username> power


Well the nearest I can find is:-

  <!-- Allow anyone to invoke methods on the Manager and Device interfaces -->
    <policy context="default">
    ..
    ..
    <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
    ..
    ..

Should this allow anyone to shutdown?  It doesn't appear to!

The HAL configuration is 'as installed' I've not done anything at all
to it.


I do have a clue as to why some work and some don't though, the system
where shutdown/restart works correctly is the one where I haven't set
up a root login.  Thus the original user set up at installation has
sudo privileges and thus I presume that one is working via the sudo
method described in the documentation.

So it would seem that shutdown only works on xubuntu 8.10 via the sudo
mechanism (which you need to add to so that additional users can shut
down).  The HAL setup on xubuntu doesn't seem to work for xfce.

I'm really not at all fussed about this, the only issue I have with it
really is that the shutdown and restart options are visible when they
don't work.  Is there any way to tell xfce4-session-logout not to show
these options?

-- 
Chris Green