Xfce Forum

ashx

Member

Registered: 2024-11-26

Posts: 2

[XFCE4] - Shutdown fails

I’m experiencing a strange issue with my Xfce setup in Yocto Scarthgap. After booting the system and logging into the GUI, the shutdown option does not work on the first click.

On clicking it again for the second time, it throws error
"Failed to run action "Shut Down"
GDBus.Error:org.xfce.SessionManager.Error. Failed: Session manager must be in idle state when requesting a shutdown"

However, if I manually:
- Kill the current xfce4-session.
- Restart the GUI using startxfce4.
The shutdown option works perfectly after that.

This behavior persists across reboots
Any guidance on troubleshooting or resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated.

VictorNutty

Member

Registered: 2025-03-31

Posts: 1

Re: [XFCE4] - Shutdown fails

Hello, I've seen your post.
I had this problem today and solved it with a simple solution.
But what caused it for me might not be the same root cause for you.

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TL;DR: Check if you have enough disk space. My syslog file swallowed the entire distro partition and then I had to manually clean it.

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In my case, I have two partitions on my Ubuntu, one for / and one for /home.
However due to the long uptime of my PC (I usually don't turn it off at night), it seems something started adding TOO MANY messages to the /var/log/syslog file, making it grow more than 11GiB, which saturated the distro partition.
I only noticed this when I tried to update some packages and instead of usual warnings of PPA repositories not having i386 architecture there were errors complaining about not enough disk space. That sounded weird for me cause my Ubuntu installation usually only takes up to 45GiB and the partition had ~68GiB.
Even after rebooting the syslog file kept its size and then I had to manually clean it with:

sudo echo "" > /var/log/syslog

After the very first reboot the process causing the flood had already died and everything got back to normal, however the damage was already done and I had to fix it myself 🤪