update 2016/07/01 6pm: SOLVED. Details here (but DO read anyway the whole post, because the cause of this problem on your computer may still be one of those below!)
I just installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a relative’s laptop (HP Pavilion G6, in case it matters) alongside Windows 8.
So far, everything works so well (*) that Ubuntu doesn’t want to shut down. If I click on shutdown, the user session ends, and nothing happens. If I type in a terminal “sudo shutdown -h now”, the desktop freezes, and nothing happens. The only way to power down the computer is to press the power button.
No problem, I thought when I first realized this. Theoretically, this should never happen in 2016, in any Linux, ever: but surely, two months after its release, a distribution so popular will have sorted this bug anyway, and there will be a sure fix for it.
Except, it doesn’t. Googling for “ubuntu 16.04 does not shut down” yelds 108K results. The first three include:
- a suggestion to “disk recheck and repair” which OK, could be the reason in some cases, but only a few
- The first 2⁄3 pages about shutdown at askubuntu are filled with this identical question by many different people, and almost all those questions** haven’t got any answer. **Not even suggestions on how to diagnose the problem, which evidently continues to happen
Any help is appreciated. Not to me, to Canonical and Ubuntu developers. Me, I’ll just wipe out Ubuntu and install some other Linux distribution, if I don’t get this sorted out without wasting more than ten more minutes the next time I have access to that laptop.
Update 2016/07/01 11:45am
- This is being discussed on the Ubuntu mailing list. Please check that thread here and here if you aren’t on that list, to see what options I already tried with the help of those fellows
- Here is, for whoever wants to have a look at it, a complete syslog from several forced (=“pressing the power button”) shutdowns I had to make this morning
- this one below, instead, is a picture I just took of the laptop screen, after booting the live, SAME version of Ubuntu from USB disk, and clicking on shutdown. It froze for a few minutes, then I got this text screen, and after 5⁄6 minutes progressing as shown, it definitely froze (about 20 minutes while I write this…)
(*) except one other thing, that I will mention in a separate post if I don’t sort it out soon. Now this “no shutdown” thing is the most important.