I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04. If it makes any difference, my system is a Dell Inspiron 1520.
I encounter a problem whenever I shutdown or restart; it kills all running processes (as far as I can tell), but once I get past the shutdown text screen and the screen goes black, my computer doesn't power off. The fans still run and the screen is still on, etc. I have to hold down the power button in order to complety shut down.
Does anyone know how to resolve this problem?
I have the same problem and found a solution which worked out for me.
Type in terminal:
EDITOR=gedit sudoedit /etc/default/grubGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force"sudo update-grubexit (to end the root shell)I found it here: Dell Studio 1569 Cannot Shutdown in Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04
Another possible solution - especially for newer hardware using (U)EFI - is to add the boot parameter apm=power_off. You can add it to the definition of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub or add the line if it does not exist yet.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="apm=power_off"
Then update the grub installation according to your operating systems manual, e.g: update-grub or grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/[osname]/grub2.cfg or similar.
It is a bug. Ref - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/987933
The key may be in this sentence, "it kills all running processes". In my case, it did NOT! The problem was caused by the redis-server process which, for some reason, couldn't be stopped normally. Once I killed all redis-serverprocesses, sudo killall redis-server, I was able to do shut down normally. Since I don't need redis that often, I stopped it from running at startup with these commands:
sudo update-rc.d -f redis-server remove
sudo update-rc.d -f redis_6379 remove
I will wait for an update that fixes this problem, but for now I will remember to stop the redis process before shutting down. It may not be redis in your case, but it's likely a buggy process that Ubuntu couldn't kill.
This may help you inspect the problem:
service --status-all: lists all services registered with the system. Services that start with OS boot will have a [+] symbol before them.
Read the log messages that appear on the screen when you press the power button to manually power off. In my case, I read something about trying to close the redis server. The messages may also appear if you press some random keys.
Review the programs you installed recently, maybe one of them is causing the problem.
Try closing all unnecessary processes and see if you can shut down normally. If you can, repeat the process, narrowing down the candidates, till you reach the buggy app.
I encountered the same thing with Ubuntu 18.04, the solution above did not work for me and I end up updating the kernel to 5.03
sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04
And then reboot.
After installing windows 10 on a different partition I had the same issue. Even after removing windows and creating a new partition table in that drive didn’t solve the problem (I thought it could be something windows installer wrote to the drive’s MBR). All the linux distros on other drives and partitions couldn’t shutdown. Kernel instructions didn’t help either. What solved the problem was removing the motherboard battery before I went to work and after this reset to the BIOS/CMOS the problem was solved.
As per suggestions above:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi=force"
Worked for powering off a Xubuntu 22.04 (with EFI boot) that didn't want to power off on shutdown.
If all else fails, see if the command line shutdown ("shutdown now") makes a difference. My laptop (Xubuntu 24.10) has the same symptom (blank screen but system not shutdown) when using the button, so I created a desktop icon to execute "shutdown now" and that works every time.
I don't know what the difference is, but I am sure someone else will elaborate.
