Comment 55 for bug 838792

Same with me Ubuntu 12.10. Following some updates Restart and Shut down from the graphic interface no longer work bringing up to the login screen. I have several graphic interfaces and they all fail - Unity, Gnome Shell, xfce and lxde. You go to the login screen when you select Power Off or Restart from the graphic menu. On the login screen these options do nothing. Terminal "sudo poweroff" and "sudo reboot" commands both work fine, but it is rather disturbing having to open a terminal and type my password each time I want to turn off or reboot my machine. None of the suggestions in this thread worked for me.

This issue seems to persist in Ubuntu for more than a year now. Anyone having any ideas how to fix it? I can't believe it doesn't bug you having to power off using the terminal every time. It should be noted that it worked initially on 12.10 and got broken only following an upgrade,