Sunday 7 June 2015

Clean shutdown for Manjaro from a keyboard shortcut

I always like to shut down my computer using a keyboard shortcut rather than the GUI.  For me,  its just faster and its one of the things I set up in all new linux setups.

The command I always used to achieve this was:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.Stop

However,  recently I found that this stopped working.

When I ran the command from a terminal I found the following error:

The name org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit was not provided by any .service files

Eventually I found a post on the ubuntu forums (referencing their french forums) which suggests that this no longer works and to try instead:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 "org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.PowerOff" boolean:true


When combined with a keyboard shortcut this works perfectly again.

Tuesday 5 May 2015

Power saving and the kernel on a Dell Vostro 200

The power saving features on the Dell I've been using for a while have been bothering me for a while.  Its running Mint 17.1 cinnamon and has always had a few issues with sleep.  I tried all sorts of permutations but left on its own the machine always crashed after a while: when going into power saving mode.

I've not totally sorted it: but I have found a parameter to add to the kernel startup which helps quite a bit:

quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor

You'll probably find using grub customizer the easiest way to test this parameter.