(This is two posts from an enquiry I've made on the Mint forum possibly better made here.)

I've recently bought quite an old Thinkpad, a T22 from 2001 - 900mhz, 20gb, 256mb. It came with XP on though it was designed for Windows 98 and 2000 according to a sticker on it, and as it was XP was a bit slow. New ram arriving this week.

I've tried a few distros on it, restricted to what I have lying around for the moment, knowing well which ones not to bother with. Debian 6 and Ubuntu 9.04 worked very well with one showstopper each. I had a possibly faulty Mint 12 LXDE CD which I let do its thing for four hours at the installation stage before abandoning this. I now have Mint 11 LXDE installed and all is well except that it will not shut down. It begins to but then hangs and I have to press the power button, as nothing else responds. I have googled this to no avail. What is likely to be the problem? Any file I can meddle with?

I will burn another Mint 12 LXDE CD later but this computer isn't going online much if at all and ideally I wouldn't bother for now if anyone can help 11 shut down.

...Later in the day now and I have burnt a second attempt at the CD and installed Mint LXDE 12. I also checked the CD was without errors.

I'm very pleased with 12, it seems tidied up in a few places, uses less memory and feels smoother overall - but, it has the same fault for me in that it doesn't shut down properly. It begins to, as 11 did, and then stops about a second before it would normally go off as it did fine with Gnome 2 distros. So this seems to be something to do with how it interacts with my laptop's hardware doesn't it? Is this anything to do with acpi? Or does LXDE have its own procedure for shutdown? I did try 'sudo reboot' in the terminal with the same result of hanging though.

(I also installed Fluxbox to see if the problem still occured when using that, but when I log out to choose Fluxbox there is no button that I see that lets me log back in again. Just two boxes, one for Desktop, one for language, and the Quit button.)

Thanks for any ideas.

Force acpi.

edit this line, adding acpi=force

then

reboot

This may not be the solution, but could work....

I was hopeful there, but that hasn't worked. I had also read elsewhere to put the same remark in /etc/modules which didn't work either, and another command which I think was apm_poweroff=1 or apm power_off=1.

(Possibly naive question) do these machines have acpi though? With some distros we had to put acpi=off to boot the live cd. Somehow I need to find where LXDE has stored its shutdown routines. The LXDE forum itself hasn't proved great. Looks like I will be trying the new Linux Mint Debian Edition in Gnome Classic mode when I can get hold of the evasive low density ram otherwise.

check your

/var/log/messages and
/var/log/syslog

to see what is going on when it hangs.

Edit - I believe they do have acpi