XFCE 4.8.0 logs out instead of shutting down

[Gilbert Sullivan]

On 08/22/2011 03:13 AM, Jérôme Guelfucci wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Mike Massonnet<mmassonnet at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2011/8/22 Dennis Gutowski<dennygoot at gmail.com>:
>>> Whenever I hit the shut down button on the top right, instead of shutting
>>> down, it logs me out.
>>>
>>> I can then shut down from the login screen.
>>>
>>> How do i solve this error?
>>
>> This most probably means xfce4-session wasn't actually able to perform
>> the action, because of a restriction for a given permission.
>>
>> AFAICT there exists two ways to shutdown, with sudo otherwise with hal.
>>
>> You should take a look at the output of xfce4-session (perhaps its all
>> stored in .xsession-errors).
>>
>> Kind Regards
>> --
>> Mike
>
> This most probably means you have xfdesktop 4.8.0. Updating to the
> latest version should fix this issue.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jérôme

I'm not sure this is related directly, but in Debian testing GDM became 
obsolete. Nowadays new installations of Debian testing with Xfce use 
XDM. That results in being able to only log out (no poweroff or reboot) 
with a standard account. I used visudo to grant permissions to use the 
scripts to regular users and created launchers for them so that they 
could shut down and restart in a more-or-less familiar manner. I'm not 
sure what the Debian maintainers of Xfce are planning, but using GDM3 is 
for the birds. It drags a ton of dependencies and does a fair job of 
breaking Xfce right now -- unless I'm very careful. I wound up 
re-installing a test system after experimenting with GDM3.

I also tried SLiM on a test system, and it worked pretty well with Xfce 
(and is prettier than XDM), but I ran into a few little problems and 
decided to stick with what Debian testing is installing as the default 
DM these days -- at least until the dust settles down a bit.

Regards,
Gilbert