Best way (native way?) to shutdown Arch from XFCE?

grscheller · 2017-02-20 04:45:42

I use XFCE desktop but without a display manager. I use startx to launch my XFCE session.

I have been using either the XFCE menus to power off/reboot the system or "sudo shutdown" command when either in X or not. I was curious about what was the Arch Linux "native" ways to do these things. From the the Arch Wikis, and on what I read in the systemctl man pages I tried the following from an xfce4-terminal:

$ systemctl poweroff

The system went down very fast. When I rebooted, the command "ip link" showed no wireless interface. Bringing up XFCE and several reboots did not bring back the wireless interface. The "dmesg | grep firmware" command did not indicate that any of the ath10k drivers were loaded.

After I did the following, I had my wireless interface back:

$ systemctl is-enabled wicd
enabled
$ sudo systemctl disable wicd
...
$ sudo systemctl enable wicd
...

After a reboot, all was fine. I have no idea whether the above commands had any effect or the system would have "fixed itself" anyway on the last reboot..

Also, when I brought Chromium up, it complained it was improperly shutdown.
Now,

$ loginctl show-session $XDG_SESSION_ID --property=Active
Active=yes
$ loginctl show-session $XDG_SESSION_ID --property=Remote
Remote=no

according to the general troubleshooting page on Arch Wiki, this indicates that regular users can use the following commands (from the cmdline or put in menus):

systemctl poweroff
systemctl reboot
systemctl hibernate
systemctl suspend

assuming the following:

1. systemd and polkit installed
2. A polkit authentication agent installed, in my case it is polkit-gnome.

What I have been using to shutdown and reboot the system are commands from a System V compatibility package:

$ pacman -Qlq systemd-sysvcompat
...
/usr/bin/halt
/usr/bin/init
/usr/bin/poweroff
/usr/bin/reboot
/usr/bin/runlevel
/usr/bin/shutdown
/usr/bin/telinit
...

The man pages for these commands have the following -

Note: These are legacy commands available for compatibility only.

I don't know, the native commands don't seem to play nice with XFCE and the System V ones are deprecated.

-Geoffrey

Trilby · 2017-02-20 12:03:20

I think you are drastically overinterpreting a one-time-error. One time you shutdown with systectl poweroff and coincidentally your wireless interface didn't show up on the next boot. Did you also update some packages in that time? If this was a laptop had it been dropped, moved, jostled? Was there a full moon? What makes you connect the wireless issue with yhe shutdown method? I'm not sure what the problem was, but I highly doubt that the shutdown command was the cause, and I'm 100% confident that disabling and enabling wicd had no effect on whether your interface was detected.

As for the browser not cleanly shutting down, this is a well known issue with some workarounds:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=179489
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=192454

My way of shutting down: I hit the power button.

Arch Linux

#1 2017-02-20 04:45:42

Best way (native way?) to shutdown Arch from XFCE?

#2 2017-02-20 12:03:20

Re: Best way (native way?) to shutdown Arch from XFCE?

Board footer