When I hit the logout button on my GNOME desktop and check off shutdown the OS does the normal shutdown procedures but it does not turn the computer off. The system is halted and I must do a hard reset and boot into MS-Win in order to shutdown the machine. I checked bugzilla for similar reports and found some that said to change a line in the /etc/inittab file from "respawn" to "once". Bug report number 11323. After making that change the problem still exists.
Been trying to validate this on several machines but only have tried two so far (Gateway 9300 laptop and AMD K6-2/400 w/ ASUS P5-A). Both exhibit the same problem. Shutdown from command line as root halts properly, with power off.
Fixed in our development version. A (untested, but approximately right) workaround is (as root): # rm /usr/bin/halt # cat > /usr/bin/halt #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/poweroff ^D # chmod 0755 /usr/bin/halt The problem is that the shutdown is invoking /usr/bin/halt instead of /usr/bin/poweroff, and halt, for reasons understood only by the maintainers of SysV init, doesn't power off any more.