removing speakup from memory?

[Tim Chase]

On January 24, 2015, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> what is the keystroke  for leaving Linux basically to shut down the 
> computer?
> Unlike DOS, i understand you cannot just turn off the machine.

Depending on how new the computer is, you can usually just hit the
power button to initiate a shutdown (as opposed to holding it in for
3-5 seconds which does a hard power-off).  The press (rather than
press-and-hold) sends a shutdown signal to the operating system.

If you want to initiate it from the command-line or over SSH, you can
usually use one of "halt", "reboot", or "shutdown".  You might have
to prefix it with "sudo" because on a multi-user system, it would be
rude to allow any old user to reboot it out from under other users.
I usually use "halt" to power down the machine, and "reboot" to,
well, reboot (that's rare).  The "shutdown" command allows for
additional options like sending messages to users that are logged in,
deferring the shutdown for a period of time, etc.

So those are the graceful ways to shut down.

That said, if you're running a modern vintage of Linux, it should be
fairly robust to handling abrupt power-offs.  Mostly it boils down to
things that your software thinks has been written to the drive but
hasn't actually made it to the drive.  If you use a journaling
file-system (unless you're running a REALLY old version of Linux or
you intentionally chose EXT2 or a FAT partition type on installation,
you've likely have a journaling file-system since it's been the
default for years).  Also, if you have external drives like a USB
drive, you'd want to make sure that either it's set to write
synchronously or that you properly unmount it since it's usually a
FAT file-system which can lose data.

And if you're booting off a live CD, doing all your work on the
internet, and not actually saving anything locally?  Feel free to
unceremoniously rip the cord from the wall since there's nothing that
won't be restored on a fresh boot.  Though I still usually just do a
regular shutdown out of habit. (grins)

-tim