[Usability] User Shut Down damaged PC

["Mark Knecht" <markknecht gmail com>]

Hi,
  I didn't know where to report this so I signed up for this list. If
there is a better place please let me know.

  We are a family of Gnome users in California. All our machines are
all Gentoo based which requires me to spend more time running update
processes in the background on everyone's computers. Naturally this
will mean that sometimes users are logged onto their machines while
I'm doing updates over ssh.

  On my son's machine he sometimes wants to reboot so that he can
play games in Windows. A few days ago he did this while I was doing
updates in the background. Apparently his timing was perfectly bad and
ha manged to reboot while new libraries were being installed. When he
attempted later to get back into Linux we found that the machine
booted but didn't get as far as gdm. No one could log in and the
machine was essentially useless.

  To fix the machine without a lot of time spent on my part I tried
emerging gdm. That didn't work. I then tried emerging all of Gnome
which also didn't work. I then rebuilt the machine completely using
emerge -e world and gdm returned.

  I feel the usability issue here is that Gnome doesn't seem to let
me remove the Shut Down... option from the System menu. If it does I
haven't discovered documentation yet telling me how to do this. If
there is documentation could someone point me at it?

  Note that I do not want to remove the Log Out option. We all share
machines here and logging out when you are done using a machine is a
user decision. Shutting the machine down is not a user decision. I
found an option to disallow logout but that's not appropriate for this
problem.

  I would like to see an option, not a requirement, to make Shut Down
either a root only operation or at least something that is password
protected. On user machines I would personally remove it from their
System menu.

  Thanks for having this list and giving me a place to report this issue.

Cheers,
Mark