Resolved: [PLUG] Shutting down without a monitor

[Richard C. Steffens]

On Monday 13 December 2004 11:17 am, Rich Shepard wrote:

>    Don't use KDE so I don't know if it responds to the ctrl-alt-backspace
> chord that kills X when xfce is the desktop/window manager. Try that
> some time when you can see what's happening. If it works, that's the first
> thing I'd do. It should shut down all the GUI apps as X goes away.

That does indeed close all running X apps, but it brings up the X login 
screen. That is good enough, though, since I can continue from there and do 
what I did before, <ctrl><alt><F1>, login as root, and type halt at the 
command prompt that, even though I can't see it, I know is there.

On Monday 13 December 2004 11:29 am, Michael Rasmussen wrote:

> You could have avoided the kmail issues by issuing an `init 3` (assuming
> RedHat SysV init style) to close X before doing your shutdown.

I didn't think of that. I did think of telinit 6, since I've used that before, 
but that would have restarted the machine. I suppose it would have done the 
same things init 3 would have done regarding X. I think the idea Rich 
suggested gets me to where I want to be.

> Does your battery backup not have a serial interface to allow power
> monitoring and automated shutdown management?

No, I got the cheap model.

On Monday 13 December 2004 11:23 am, Fedor Pikus wrote:

> If you have recent PC and kernel, you can get ACPI support to work. By
> "recent" I don't mean super-modern, I have ACPI working on a
> 3-years-old motherboard with 2.4.26 kernel. You may have to figure out
> how to configure it after it's working, but at least on Fedora Core 1,
> out of the box, pressing the power button initiates the shutdown.

My motherboard is from around 1998, and even though I'm using the 2.6 kernel, 
I don't think that idea works, unless there's a setting I could change. I 
accidentally hit the power button when reaching for the reset button a week 
or two ago, and the machine powered down.

> Otherwise, the easiest is probably to do Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-Delete
> (this initiates reboot) and then wait for the sign that PC is booting
> up (usually it'll beep when it's POSTing) and power it off.

Yes, that should work; I do hear the POST beeps on reboot. While it might be 
slightly quicker, the process outlined above gets me to a powered down state, 
and the note stuck to the side of the monitor is pretty short.

Thanks for all your ideas. Now, I'm ready for the next power outage.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens
http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/