New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
That's a great data point. I don't think I've encountered a system that made that distinction (either that, or I've never encountered one with that distinction, upon which I've also had permission to halt or shut it down).
The desktop environment itself has permissions associated with it; were you to kill it, you would have to authorize to restart KDM or GDM or whatever login manager you use.
If you want a regular user to be able to reboot or halt or shutdown without special authorisation, you can add that user to your sudoers file:
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/halt, /usr/sbin/reboot, /usr/sbin/poweroff
If your current user is not a member of the ``wheel`` group already, add yourself to that group with
$ sudo usermod -a -G wheel $USER
Now your user can issue commands like ``sudo reboot`` without entering a password. Pre-authorisation is already granted through sudo.
You may also be able to just add yourself to a special group that already has permission to reboot and halt without auth, but which group that is depends on how your distro has set up groups.
Another possibility is that your user has permission to shutdown or reboot, but does not have access to the location where they are stored (/sbin or /usr/sbin, for example). Again, adding that user to an administrative group is the easy way to provide access.