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I am using BSD at the moment and think I have an X compatibility problem where my computer doesn't shut down. It can cause problems because I have to turn off the power manually while there is no display (so I don't know what stage the system shutdown is at.)

Does anyone know how to enable messages after log out, shutdown?

Wasabi
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  • Have you taken a look in your log files like Xorg.log & syslog ? – Coren Feb 26 '12 at 11:00
  • Try to shutdown X first, then shutdown from tty console. The timing of the error is significant, sometimes shutdown errors occur after filesystems are unmounted or after daemons are stopped, like syslogd. – bsd Feb 26 '12 at 12:58
  • Ok, thanks for your answers. I was asking is there a way to get the display to show the shutdown process as it is shutting down. Verbose boot is possible but I can't get display after X. Tried CTRL+T. –  Feb 27 '12 at 10:59
  • Have you tried ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X? – bsd Feb 28 '12 at 03:21

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If you have a second device handy, turn on sshd and connect to the machine. You might be able to look at the /var/log/messages plus the X logs after trying to shutdown X. It might give you a clue as to what happened. You can also try a shutdown this way instead of starting it from X.

I've had cases where my desktop screen froze up on FreeBSD in the past, and I was able to ssh in and shut it down cleanly. Most of those cases involved compatibility issues with acceleration and disabling DRI/DRM solved it for me. You could also see if it occurs with the VESA driver.

Luke
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  • Thanks, Luke. I will try that if I can work out how to do it. I think my problem comes from logging out of Gnome, Openbox. KDE works ok. Because of problems with X, I want to try and get rid of it completely so I can have a more simple setup (and shutdown messages displayed as they occur!). – Wasabi Feb 28 '12 at 13:28
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You can see the recent kernel messages in dmesg, maybe it'll be useful (some process can't be killed, or something similar). You can also check the old logs here: /var/log/dmesg Also, if you say there is no display, try to change your console to different: Ctrl-Alt-F1 to F8 and try to run dmesg there.

kenorb
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