Immediate shutdown (no waiting)

If you are running from CD and have no devices mounted, you can press Alt-F2 and enter

Code:

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sudo poweroff -f

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and the computer powers down within just a second.

IMHO, this is fully sufficient if running from CD.

Coming from Mac OS 9, I am not used to waiting when actually trying to shut down the computer. (The bootup time is also a problem. Hopefully Kernel 2.6 will allow for reliable Suspend-to-Disk...)

(Does anyone of the experts know whether the HDs get "synced" when using "poweroff -f"? If yes, one could possibly even use it with HD installs - but I don't recommend it.)

pull the cd out and turn the power off

Re: poweroff -f

This doesn't work on a hard disk install - I did: sync;sync;sync;poweroff -f
and it turned off real good, but then had to do fsck on the next boot.

init 0 works, but is slow.

It seems like there should be something in between - not as slow/thorough as "init 0", but which still unmounts the system disk before turning off.

I tried: mount -o remount,ro /dev/hdaX
but (predictably) this didn't work.

I simply type "halt" or "reboot" sans quotes in a console window and that does it for me on my hd install.

Or you could go through Init 0 and slim down the actions it takes, or even make it all symmetrical(in rc0.d).
My updated system shuts off pretty quickly, so I don't know how much success I can report, but I'll try on the laptop and see how it goes...
Well, I guess
root@lappy:~# init 0
is just a faster way to do shutdown(because it is quite a bit faster: does the kill everything right away instead of waiting.)