Comment 3 for bug 35182

Okay, thanks for doing the research on that. Condensing all you've found, does (as root):

/sbin/usplash_down
/sbin/usplash_write "System is shutting down, please wait..."
/sbin/shutdown -h now

shut your system down with usplash okay?

>Ideally the hal-system-power-shutdown script should try to shutdown
>computer via gdm

Nahh, this is the wrong way round, gdm should ask hal that it wants to shutdown, as hal is not aware of anything "per-session" as it's "per-system". The hal-system-power-shutdown script is to abstract how to do the actual shutdown, with distro tweaks (like the usplash thing) and where files are not in standard locations between distros.

This abstraction allows gdm/g-p-m/whatever to call the Shutdown() dbus methods without worrying about "how" the method is performed, and any tweaks only have to be done in one place (e.g. gdm, kdm, etc).

Richard.