Yet another shutdown problem on Asus laptop

I know I’m not the only one with this problem. I have googled extensively, tried suggestions posted for the same problem (such as adding “acpi=force” to the kernel line in grub) to no avail, tried different drivers to no avail. I’ve not had a go at different kernel versions, nor the patch mentioned in the link below as I’ve no idea how to do it. Had the same in Ubuntu 9.04.

My laptop is this one: Asus F5Gl [Linux Laptop Wiki]

graphics card version is GeForce 8200mg. I’ve OpenSUSE 11.1 64bit, gnome, latest kernel.

Everything works perfectly except shutdown: have to do init 3 + login as root + shutdown -h now > shutdown process switches off all the hardware correctly, finally gets stuck at “the system will be halted immediately”, at which point I keep the power button pressed down to switch power off (at this point it’s safe to do so). Also battery power indicator doesn’t work (lsmod seems to recognize its presence but acpi -b gives nothing at all), neither does the screen brightness adjusting function.

Is there anyone in the exact same situation, the same laptop, graphics card, opensuse and kernel version and has found something that works? Or do I have to conclude that the only thing to do is to wait that NVIDIA, hopefully, comes up with a perfectly-functioning driver?

This is not a major problem as switching off in the way described above is safe, but it is annoying. Well, if there’s no solution, I guess I’ll live with it since I love OpenSUSE too much to want to change distro.

My laptop is an Advent 9315
I have openSuSE 11.1 with current pae kernel and command line options “noapic” and “acpi=off” (unable to install or boot without these).

The restart works but my computer also freezes on shutdown after reaching run level 0. The last message given comprises “Skipped services in run level 0” and, on the end of that line, the message continues “SuSEfirewall2_setup”.

I use the off button to shut down manually but sometimes I forget and run the battery flat (and make my laptop hot in its case). It would be nice to have a solution, if possible.