Shutdown Hanging

[TonyK]

No, 290.10 was not working correctly and I went from there to the most recent driver to see if that would make a difference, but it did not.  In fact, I think that it made things worse.  Now, the minute I tell it to shutdown it gives me a black screen without a signal to the monitor.  It no longer gives me a screen that shows what it is doing.

[AS]

No, 290.10 was not working correctly and I went from there to the most recent driver to see if that would make a difference, but it did not.  In fact, I think that it made things worse.  Now, the minute I tell it to shutdown it gives me a black screen without a signal to the monitor.  It no longer gives me a screen that shows what it is doing.

290.10 is the driver provided on the current LiveCD KDE-2012.02, it means that a reinstall is not going to help.

AS

[TerryN]

If you have been force powering-off the system you should probably check your filesystems.  There are some excellent instructions here  

Before resorting to the power button it is always worth trying the "magic SysRq" sequence.  This is a bit of keyboard gymnastics to directly tell the kernel you want to shutdown and is useful when you cannot get the OS to respond any other way.

This is done by holding down Alt and SysRq (which is the Print Screen key) while slowly typing REISUO
This is a set of single letter commands to kernel which tell it to:

    R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode
    E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init
    I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init
    S: Sync all mounted filesystems
    U: Remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode
    O: Power off, without unmounting partitions or syncing

(can also use B as the last command to restart rather than power off)
There may not be any visible response to the commands except the last.

The S and U commands should help prevent damage to your File Systems.

Terry

[TonyK]

Thanks everyone for the help you have given me.  But I think that it is time to accept the fact that my hardware does not like PCLinuxOS.  My laptop runs it fine and I will find another Linux distro that can run ok on the desktop.  I have certainly learned a lot from the generous people on this forum.

[longtom]

It does happen sometimes with those bloomin' Nvidia drivers and Good Luck with that.

I, for one, had exactly the opposite experience with an old 5200 Ultra card.  Every distro I loaded the screen was some ludicrous resolution I couldn't use because everything was so small and to get the proper  driver was installed one had to have a degree in bash scripting ...
Alternatively I didn't have a GUI at all ....
Coming to PCLinuxOS everything is just perfect from the start, correct resolution, transparency etc ....

Hope you come right soon!!

[AS]

Hi menotu  Thanks for the reply.
The first thing that I did after installing was to update the packages.

My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.  How do I find out which driver is being used?

Could be of some interest:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,104561.0.html

AS

[TonyK]

Hi menotu  Thanks for the reply.
The first thing that I did after installing was to update the packages.

My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.  How do I find out which driver is being used?

Could be of some interest:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,104561.0.html

AS

Thanks for the link.  I think that I will wait awhile to let things settle down with the nVidia drivers and try again later.

[Old-Polack]

Hi menotu  Thanks for the reply.
The first thing that I did after installing was to update the packages.

My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.  How do I find out which driver is being used?

Could be of some interest:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,104561.0.html

AS

Thanks for the link.  I think that I will wait awhile to let things settle down with the nVidia drivers and try again later.

Try the 173.14.31 driver. Do the setup for the video card in PCC --> Hardware --> Configure Video Card. For the Graphic Card entry choose the GeForce FX Series option. When asked if you want the proprietary driver choose Yes. Set the Resolution to whatever is right for your monitor, Then click the Quit button. Close PCC, log out, then log back in. The NVIDIA Display Settings app should show the 173 driver being used.

When your graphic card was new, the 173 driver was the one it originally used. (could have been the earlier 169, but it should be perfectly happy with the 173) I have a GeForce 9800 card in this machine, and it works with every nVidia driver from the 173 to the present. The 173 driver does not recognize my card by name, but works great. The 177 nVidia driver does recognize my card by name, but adds nothing to the performance over the 173. Your card is one generation older than mine so the 173 should work fine and recognize the card by name.

[houndhen]

I like the NVidia Display Settings which provides useful NVidia info (can be found in KMenu > Applications > More Applications > Configuration

or in a konsole  run the command

nvidia-settings

This will give you driver version and a bit more besides

Can also use the command

rpm -qa | grep nvidia

this may show a few nvidia drivers but the numbers that are "highlighted"  should designate which driver is in use.  

my driver version is 295.40 and shows:

x11-driver-video-nvidia-current-295.40-1pclos2012

I am having a shutdown problem with my laptop and a search turned up this thread. I am running PCLOS Phoenix xfce 32 bit on a Toshiba Techra A9 with Intel Core2 duo CPU @ 2.20 Gh.

My normal shutdown from the gui goes to a blank screen with a white line(dash) that does not blink or anything. It just hangs there. I tried the shutdown from the no gui option but didn't get the shutdown command to work. I entered (shutdown -h), but kept getting the shutdown command with the available options. By running the above commands from the konsole it shows that my nvidia version is 302.17. What else can I try?
Thanks,
Harold

update
Tried the command shutdown -h now and it shut down.

[TonyK]

Your shutdown problem is different from the one I had.  I am glad that you were able to shutdown using the "shutdown - h now" command.  You may want to use that command from a terminal if your GUI continues to hang.  I don't know what to do to fix your problem.  I was not able to fix the problem I had but the post from TerryN, above, gave me enough information the regain command of my computer without having to pull the plug on it.

[johnmart]

Tony I also have an Nvidia issue that gives a different problem to yours. I tried several Nvidia drivers to no avail. I simply switched to non-proprietary driver (nouveau) and all is fine for me.
If you want to give it a try;
PCC>Hardware>Configure Video Card>Graphic Card
Choose the FX series as Neal suggested and when prompted if you want the proprietary version choose no.
Actually choosing the Nvidia 6100 / non-proprietary did me fine. (Geforce G105M)
Good luck
john

[TonyK]

Thanks Johnmart.  I had to install Linux Mint 12 on that computer, a desktop machine, and it worked ok. Mint did not like my sound card so I was able to use the onboard sound.  The graphics problem, however, was a real deal breaker when I was not able to get it to work.

My preference is to use PCLinuxOS and I am using that on my laptop.  If I try upgrading the Mint machine, I will try PCLinuxOS first before going with Mint again. Because PCLinuxOS just feels good to use, I spend more time now on my laptop.  But I do miss my 23" Display on the desktop.