Kubuntu hangs on shutdown

Question

Moved out of Unity and installed Kubuntu and so got back familiar desktop, etc but on shut down it starts and then hangs. I had this problem with Unity, as well. No problem with earlier version and than upgraded to Unity. Please advise.

Answer 1

After months of attempts to fix this, I've finally found one that works for Kubuntu 11.04 (Natty). The problem is that Kubuntu (and I believe KDE more generally) starts the shutdown process in a way different than Gnome/Ubuntu, so even the dbus / netbase fixes and using autofs that I've seen proposed in different forums all didn't work. I think KDE begins shutting down userspace functions like network manager first before the /etc/init scripts or /home/user/.kde/shutdown scripts are called upon. Just speculation on my part, but that'd be my guess.

But I apparently found the place where Kubuntu actually starts the shutdown process, or close to it - it's in the /usr/bin/starkde script. Immediately after the line saying "echo 'startkde: Shutting down...' 1>&2", I inserted a line saying "sudo umount -t cifs -a -f -l". Then, using visudo as root ("sudo visudo"), I edited the sudoers file to allow the sudo command to execute umount without a password by adding the line (at the bottom of the file) "username ALL=(root) NOPASSWD:/bin/umount". Worked like a charm.

Answer 2

I have a similar problem, but I've noticed it only happens when I'm at the office. Some digging has produced a 4 year old bug in CIFS that causes a 5 minute hang at shutdown when the network is disabled before CIFS mounts can be unmounted.

I'll do some more checking but if you are mounting SAMBA or other shares over a network using CIFS or SMBFS this might be why you can't shutdown properly.

Try running the following command before shutdown to see if it has any effect.

sudo umount -a

Once I find a reliable way to automate this command I'll post it here

EDIT:

Oops forgot to add links

New detailed bug report

Ancient undead bug report with more posts than you can shake a bone at

Also note that I had issues with shutdown earlier this year due to Plymouth not being update correctly (my fault, I copied files as root where I shouldn't have) so if this doesn't solve your problem, give some more detail so we can try and help you out.