GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 70710
Cannot communicate Logout/Shut Down/Reboot actions to session manager
Last modified: 2005-01-06 10:33:00 UTC
To Reproduce: 1) Start panel , gnome-panel-2 &. 2) Choose Actions -> Logout. Logout Dialog missing Actions menu box, containing radio button options Logout, ShutDown, & Reboot. On Linux Shutdown resides in /sbin and reboot in /usr/bin, On Solaris reboot & shutdown reside in /usr/sbin, perhaps this they are not being picked up on logout.
tagging as gnome2
Seth: wasn't it the decision of the usability team that these options were confusing? Or am I the confused one? :)
These are supposed to be split into seperate menu items, but this hasn't happened yet. We definitely need to fix this for GNOME2 but its probably a seperate bug.
We should use "Restart" rather than "Reboot". It would be worth considering "Turn Off" rather than "Shutdown". If you go through with using menus, I would recommend: Actions-> Run... Lock Screen ____________ Restart Shutdown ____________ Logout
can we go ahead with the changes recommended by nickel ?
Arvind: you should go ahead with a patch to fix snickell's problem, but you should also attach (as a separate patch!) something to fix the problem found by keelin boyle. Really, these should be treated as two separate bugs; I think I misunderstood the problem when it was first reported.
Louie, I think the problem is that in GNOME 2 we don't have an actions box yet, its not a Solaris specific issue (at least, I see the same thing as Kevin on x86 Debian). This is a case where a GNOME 1 feature has not yet been implemented. Thus a solution to Kevin's problem would be to follow my suggestion, or we could simply duplicate what was in GNOME 1 (though I think this would be a waste of effort, as putting multiple menu items in is better, and is basically the same amount of work).
Yeah, should have marked this 'all'. Fixing that now.
Marking up to Urgent; this really has to be fixed, as it is extremely basic to the entire system.
Changing the bug title.
*** Bug 61539 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 72602 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think people have been giving Windows the three-finger salute long enough for "Reboot" to have seeped into the culture at large. Changing this to "Restart" would be confusing because you can restart many different things, including the session. "Restart this computer" would remove that ambiguity, but why bother. Everyone and his grandmother knows "Reboot". "Shutdown" is plainly wrong because it's a noun. The correct verb phrase is "Shut Down" as is shown in Nils' panel menu proposal. That is also a common phrase outside of computing. "Logout" is also wrong because it is a noun. Again, Nils' proposal gets this right. http://www242.pair.com/nilsp/nils/panel/menus.html (readable) http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/proposals/menus.html (all scrunched up)
I'm not sure I agree that we should use reboot. Both MacOS and Windows use restart, it feels like a less archane word, and I don't really see where its ambiguous. I don't think anyone is going to confuse restart with "restart your session". Esp. if sessions get buried like I hope they do ;-) I agree with "Shut Down" and "Log Out"
btw the reason they show up in the linux logout dialog and not solaris is that it's a (red hat) linux specific hack which allows non-root users to shutdown the machine if they are logged into the console.
It's actually not a hack at all, but a clean solution to allow users at the console to shut down the machine.
Currently there is no way of communicating to the session manager from the panel which action (logout,shutdown,restart) was selected. Because the call made from the client, 'SmcRequestSaveYourself' does not allow this additional information to be passed. This is due to the limitations of XSMP. Hence we may have to retain the existing functionality. As Owen suggested this probably will have to be looked in the future as UI improvement. Please also refer to mail archives for thoughts exchanged on this bug. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-March/msg00445.html
Okay, so this now looks like its a feature request for the session manager. Adjusting everything accordingly
Okay, let me clarify that :-) This requires extending the session manager to allow the action required for the SaveYourself to be communicated .... This is definetly something for the future .....
Does this really need a change to the session management protocol? xsm responds to SIGTERM with a fast shutdown, and to SIGUSR1 as a checkpoint request. The gnome session manager could do this and in addition process SIGUSR2 as a requested shutdown or reboot.
This works as it should in the Solaris GNOME build fcs_07. Logout presents these options only if the user is logged in as root. This bug can be closed.
Brian: this bug somehow got from "broken on Solaris" to "we need some way of putting these options in the menus". Weird. Good to hear that problem is fixed in any case.
So is there still a bug here?
I think that there is still a usability issue here: "Shut Down" "Restart" and "Log out" should all be menu items in the Actions menu instead of being in one dialog. And if it isn't possible for the user to shutdown/reboot then only the "Log Out" option should be there.
The remaining usability issue looks like a dup of #92277 to me, I'd suggest closing this one as a dup of that since the originally-reported problem here seems to be resolved. (If there are any other outstanding issues here I've missed, they should probably be filed as new bugs...)
I wasn't aware of #92277 and since I'm the one who has been harping on about this, I'm going to close this. Thanks Calum *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 92277 ***
This bug is not fixed. You ask the session manager to log out by sending a SaveYourselfRequest to the session manager with shutdown == TRUE. There is no way of telling the session manager that you want to reboot or shutdown the computer after logging out. XSMP sucks in other words.
Created attachment 31431 [details] [review] Debian patch Debian has a patch to use some fancy new stuff in GDM 2.6. Could this be used?
Looks like it might be worth considering, I think it even probably makes more sense to have GDM do the shutting down rather than using consolehelper directly.
Okay, I'm going to re-mark this as a dup of #92277 because it looks like we're going to go with a solution which involves asking GDM to shutdown/reboot. There will be some gnome-session changes involved, but lets figure those out in bug #92277. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 92277 ***