Sunday 1 November 2009

Suppress 60 second delay in Logout/Restart/Shutdown

With Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, there is a 60 second confirmation delay when logging out, restarting or shutting down.  This default can be over-ridden to act instantly rather than waiting for a confirmation (and 60 second timeout) by setting the apps/indicator-session/suppress_logout_restart_shutdown boolean to true as follows:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/indicator-session /suppress_logout_restart_shutdown' --type bool true

(or use gconf-editor to do this if you want to use a GUI based tool).

I suspect the rationale behind the 60 second confirmation delay is just in case one selects logout, restart or shutdown accidentally and in doing so, one has the ability to cancel this before accidentally closing one's session.   So beware if you use this tweak - it assumes you really want to instantly logout, restart or shutdown!

8 comments:

  1. Yes, the reason for those is that they're potentially destructive commands if you use programs that don't support session management. You could loose data if you accidentally hit one. Good luck! :)

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  2. @Ted: I agree it's good to have some level of sanity checking before losing my session; however, I like to logout and shutdown fairly quickly - by the time I've done the necessary navigation around the desktop to do a logout/restart/shutdown, I'm kinda sure I want to do it :-)

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  3. I alway have a terminal session opened so using 'sudo reboot / sudo poweroff' works fastest for me with no delays ;-)

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  4. By the time I find an answer, I know if the answer was worth working for operating system.

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  5. Not allowing the end user any options is not what ubuntu means. (That's a duh!)

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  6. I'm not entirely sure what the last two comments were referring to. Care to elaborate please? Thanks!

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  7. First of all, thanks for this. The previous solutions I've read involve going through the GUI, which is not as good.

    Secondly, I think I know what Anon@3/21 21:41 meant. This 'feature' feels like some decision-maker insisted on it, and the UE designers and developer implemented it with no feeling for the value. We can't set the logout delay, it doesn't suggest to us that we go about saving work, and we have to do internet searches to learn how to turn it off. This may relate to what Anon@3/21 21:39 meant.

    This is not a useful feature. I don't think I have any applications that will not themselves suggest I save their data when they receive the shutdown signal.

    This is a harmful feature. This laptop starts up and logs in to my wife's profile. In order to get nm-applet running in my session, I have to log her off and log in as me, I can't just 'switch user.' This feature introduced a hurdle to that, which I have to do all the time.

    It doesn't seem super well thought out. The place to turn it off at migrated from Jaunty to Karmic, and there's no little 'stop doing this' checkbox, which one would expect.

    I could just use shutdown, but I like to give Ubuntu and GNOME every chance to respond to my actions by using their API.

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  8. Thanks for this. I read through a bunch of forum posts that, instead of answering the question, said that the default behavior was fine. Or they said to create an menu item to "sudo shutdown -h now". I switched to Ubuntu to make my desktop life easier. Thanks for the succinct answer.

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