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This seems too long to me, and longer than I recall when I had a Mint boot. I am currently dual booting. Is this normal? If not, what might be the cause?

cfye14
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2 Answers2

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Given that the question has no other clues (besides the absence of shutdown log), I can only provide the answer by guessing based on my experience only.

Is this normal?

I can't tell, but may be normal for your current setup (which I don't know how you set up the dual-boot with Linux Mint). But if you were to compare with mine, yours is not normal.

I have a quite aged, second hand, circa-2005 single-core machine. This machine has been installed with Xubuntu 14.04 to primary partition and multiboot with other distro (always changing, but Linux Mint 17 was one of them) on other partitions.

Yet, the machine can shut down Xubuntu 14.04 in less than 10 seconds--this is my normal.

If not, what might be the cause?

From here onwards is just guessing, talking about possibilities (which I can think of, but not necessarily have experience) for your case. You may check from the listing below.

  • Did you setup shared partitions between Xubuntu and Linux Mint? Sharing partition such as /home may cause slow access, depending on their compatibility. However, this issue is irrelevant for sharing /swap partition.

  • Did you setup encrypted partitions on Xubuntu? Unmounting encrypted partition may behave differently than non-encrypted ones.

  • Did you setup RAID array for your Xubuntu? Occasional bug may present for systems that has been installed with RAID configuration.

  • Which Xubuntu release are you using? Regular releases such as 14.10, 15.04 etc. occasionally introduce issues which are not present on LTS releases. Booting or shutdown issue could be one of them. Read the release note of your release on this Ubuntu Wiki.

  • Is the partition where Xubuntu been installed has disk error or having corrupted filesystem? You could use fsck to check disk error (backup first, because running fsck may have risk of making any corrupted filesystem even worse), or see if reinstalling Xubuntu will make any difference (as last resort).

Besides above, if Linux Mint boots and shutdown fine on the same hard disk, there is likely something amiss with your current setup for Xubuntu. That is all I can say.

Updated: I just found this post which has similar symptoms like your case. The answer suggests "The wrong driver is loaded which prevents shutdown".

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So, this was pretty stupid, but I solved the issue. The key was to change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to quiet from quiet splash in /etc/default/grub, so I could see what was happening during shut down. As alluded to here, there's not really a system log for shut downs, so removing the splash screen helps.

Anyway, I'd placed a script in /etc/init.d to try to manage wifi some time ago. It wasn't compliant with init script formatting, so I gather it was taking the system some time to terminate the script. I don't know why I just recently noticed the delayed shutdown time.

cfye14
  • 325