Newbie help

[dickinsd]

Thomas Kaiser Wrote: 
> Why is it not possible to shut down the computer with the power switch?
> 
> My coffee machine has a power switch I press there to turn it on and I
> 
> press on the same switch to turn it off again. Shouldn't it be the same
> 
> with a computer? As far as I remember, on a Sun workstation you can
> just 
> press the power switch to shutdown the workstation. It is also possible
> 
> with with windowz XP. Just press the powerswitch and windowz XP will 
> shut down. How about Ubuntu? Can I just press the powerswitch and
> Ubuntu 
> shuts down cleanlly?
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 

hehe. I know what you mean.

Ok so just turning it off can cause damage to the HDD's.

But you pointed out you can do it with the power switch on Sun machines
and XP.

Yes you can, but your BIOS has to support it (most will) and you have
to tell Windows what you want it to do when you press the power button,
somtimes this seems to set its self up ( I have no idea why it does this
sometimes) other times you have to do this in the Power Management area
of Windows.

Linux (IMO) don't seem to 'disregard' the BIOS as much as Windows does,
so have an ACPI motherboard on a Linux machine and it will almost
certainly mean that you can just hit the power button and it will shut
down fine for you.

I have 4 machines in my home, 
2 are 100% WinXP
1 is Fedora Core 3 and WinXP
1 is Fedora Core 3 and Ubuntu

all of those machines/OS's allow me to just hit the power button and
they power down properly.

The main problem that *squareyes* mentioned is that this person just
stopped the power from going to the machine when he had finished with
it.

In the -dark- days you could shatter a HDD platter doing this as the
head would just drop where ever it was at the time.

I have not heard of a single story like that for at least5 years, so I
think this may be an impossibility now, but it still aint good, talk
about asking for trouble with lost data and bad blocks etc.

Dave

PS: I would be very interested in seeing your HTML guide, do you intend
to post this at this site or at a site of your own?


-- 
dickinsd