29 October, 2011

Kubuntu 11.10 not shutting down?

I did several upgrades from Natty to Oneiric on most of our family PCs (we have got some seven PC running Ubuntu/Kubuntu). All seemed well and dandy untill I tried to shut them down.
Some of our Kubuntu PCs upgraded to KDE 4.7 through Kubuntu-backports refused to shut down. The computer went through the complete shutdown sequence but instead of shutting down at the end it was just sitting there, doing nothing. The strange thing was that it worked OK on some the upgraded PCs but not on the other ones. A short test of
  shutdown now -h 
revealed that it was not a kernel problem. And some googling later I found out that it was a problem with KDE upgrade. When the update manager asked me to replace or keep kdmrc file i in some cases selected "keep" and in some "replace". And on all PCs a had chosen "replace" the shutdown worked perfectly, the other ones had problems.
So, if you upgrade your Kubuntu to KDE 4.7 and your PC won't shut down properly, do the following:

  • go to /etc/kde4/kdm/
  • find kdmrc file and verify that you can find the line 
HaltCmd= /sbin/shutdown -h now

  • to fix you can either follow the tutorial here

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3116268.msg259432#msg259432


  • or you can just replace your current kdmrc file with the new one kdmrc.dpkg-dist like this 
cp kdmrc.dpkg-dist kdmrc


  • then you can just set all your KDM preferences through the standard KDE preferences