I couldn't get shutdown to work. The error I got indicated that shutdown couldn't communicate to the init command pipe. I have an idea that when init starts up it sets up its command pipe but then the file system is switched and the pipe is no longer connected to the 'active' file system. When you use the -n option you are bypassing all the init kill scripts. Halt with a link to reboot is working great. Since I already modified the firefox.sh script I feel pretty good putting all my mods there. I haven't had to change any other part of the distribution except adding a few packages and changing out mozilla-firefox for firefox. I did that so I could use an extension that would only install on firefox version 1.0 .