DSL Tips and Tricks :: Instant powerdown tip

Running from the live cd, no swapfile, no drives mounted, I find it quite blissful to simply touch the power button on my computer-and, instantly, its off! No waiting around.........

Or, if you have a hdd install, you can do what I did. There's a bit more to it though, but fun. I created two icons for "Restart" and "Shutdown". With icon tool I created the two icons with the following commands:
Shutdown- "exitcheck.sh shutdown"
Restart- "exitcheck.sh reboot"

I just chose some png file that was already listed. Then I made these two png files with transparent background. The pngs can be viewed here (link removed - no longer valid) , since I cant post png files here. Then I added these two to /home/dsl/.xtdesktop and modified the desktop icons to use those pngs. Now, all I have to do is just one click to either reboot or shutdown. If you want to do the same, you're more than welcome to use those pngs.

I went a step further. In /etc/init.d are some scripts, namely knoppix-halt and knoppix-reboot. I was getting a segfault at shutdown during cardctl eject (old laptop is physically incapable of ejectting a card anyway) so I just commented that whole if...fi block out. While I was at it, I commented out most of the sleep statements and cut the value of usleep in mysleep() to 35000. Now it shuts down and reboots rather fast...

original here.