Shutdown and reboot options not available?

Jaap Winius jwinius at umrk.nl
Wed Dec 19 02:19:10 CET 2012


Hi folks,

In my quest to develop the new Debian wheezy configuration for my  
site, I've managed to find another major issue: users cannot shut down  
or reboot their workstations from within Xfce.

With Debian squeeze this was easy enough to do: just add a line that  
reads "ALL ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/xfsm-shutdown-helper" to  
/etc/sudoers and it works as expected. Not so with wheezy.

With a fresh install of Debian wheezy, to begin with the Xfce 4.8  
logout screen has five options available: Log Out, Restart, Shut down,  
Suspend and Hibernate. The 1st, 4th and 5th options seem to work fine  
(tested on a laptop with xfce4-power-manager installed), but  
unfortunately Restart and Shut down do not. Selecting either of these  
log-out options results in a dialog window requesting the root password.

The second thing I noticed was that the xfsm-shutdown-helper program  
has been moved to a new directory:  
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/session/. I changed the line in  
/etc/sudoers accordingly, but it makes no difference.

Thirdly, the Debian wiki (http://wiki.debian.org/Xfce) states that the  
correct command with which to start up Xfce in wheezy is "exec  
ck-launch-session /bin/bash -login /etc/X11/Xsession %session". Adding  
this to /etc/slim.conf (for the login manager I'm currently working  
with) changed Xfce's behavior: now the logout screen displays only  
three available options -- Log Out, Restart and Shut down -- but with  
the last two grayed out.

Losing the the Suspend and Hibernate options is okay with me, since  
the configuration I'm working on is only meant for workstations, but I  
really do need those Shut down and Restart options to work.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks,

Jaap


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