Poweroff gives "Policy timeout is not valid"

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:51:23 +0100
Daniele <d.conca at gmail.com> wrote:

> " Action forbidden
> Policy timeout is not valid. Please wait a few seconds and try again. "
> 
> If I wait any amount of time I get the same error.
> This only happens if I boot to the shell and start the xserver
> manually with startx. If I login through gdm and then press the power
> button the system shutdown works correctly.
> I have the same issue using both Gnome and Xfce.

This is because the shutdown is dependent on running gdm - gdm runs as
root, and the shutdown buttons and dialogs in such a session have root
privileges. Thus, when you shutdown from a session started from gdm, the
shutdown comand runs.

If you start X from a tty ( tty1-6), you are running as your user - (unless
you startx as root, which is *not* a good idea... for all kinds of reasons)

To shutdown or reboot from such a "startx" session, you can for example
open a terminal and run

sudo shutdown -h now  ( to halt the system)  or
sudo shutdown -r now  ( to reboot)

sudo halt    or
sudo reboot

also should work.

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 7.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html
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