Thinkpad T22 will not shut down

[tpprynn]

(This is made from two posts to the mint forum.)

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. 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?

...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 (in the terminal)

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]

There are usually 2 or 3 shutdown execs, among which is always lxde-logout for an LXDE desktop. Go to /usr/share/applications and search for shutdown to see what you have available. Also, you might want to look in the other application directories. See http://douwil7.100webspace.net/linux/Tuning.html#11 for more information. These can be always edited as root. Be sure the line OnlyShowIn= includes LXDE.