On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 08:23 -0600, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 15:47 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > I find these buttons very useful. My machine double boots. Sometimes I
> > make a mistake and allow the machine to boot to the wrong OS. Using
> > these buttons I can correct the situation. Other times I boot my machine
> > and I realize before I login that I really wanted to shutdown the
> > machine.
>
> "your" machine => single-user environment.
>
> > But I confused by your question. How does this extra functionality hurt
> > you or anyone else?
> Do you expect arbitrary users to switch off an unattended ("free")
> machine in a lab's or an office's machine pool, a classical workstation
> scenario?
Bottom line answer to this is emphatically YES ABSOLUTELY! If it's a
kiosk type machine.
Workstation != kiosk.
A workstation is being shared amongst several users, users who aren't
necessarily logged into the console.
In fact, given today's energy costs, I actually
would hope that someone would be savvy enough to do this at the end of
the day. There is absolutely no risk in powering such a system down as
the next user would only need to power the thing back up.
To shutdown a machine, the "instance/authority" shutting down a machine
would have to know that nobody is wanting to use a machine.
My home computer has multiple user accounts
This is a different
scenario than what I am talking about.
If you truly have a multi-user environment - and multi-user means
that
more than 1 person is logged onto the machine simultaneously - then you
have a different scenario, and in this case, the system essentially is a
server.
Well, any workstation and any Linux system to some extend is a server :)
> Q: How to disable these buttons permanently?
I'm not certain, however I would be hesitant to do this.
Why? This is the classical workstation-pool scenario. A set of machines
being up around the clock and not supposed to be switched off.
Ralf