My primary Linux computer is a laptop, so I am always shutting it down. Having recently converted from Mandrake to SuSe 9.0 Pro. I found it annoying that my regular user account could not shutdown or restart the computer. Having to log off and then shutdown from the display manager was getting very tiresome and opening a console to SU so I could shutdown was almost as bad.
While I appreciate the SuSe developers attention to security, not all installations of Linux need to be so tightly locked down. Since a laptop is almost always a single user machine there is no need to worry about another user shutting it down while you are working. My solution to this problem was to creating a symlink in /usr/bin to /sbin/shutdown
ln -s /sbin/shutdown /usr/bin/shutdown
Then I set SUID to the link.
chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown
There is a setting in Yast as to who is able to initiate shutdown. I have it set to all users and it shows as an option when I log out. No fuss, no muss.
BTW I am really beginning to become annoyed with SuSeconfig. Every time I run YAST2 or YOU it changes the startup order of the services in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d back to the SuSe defaults. Completely, ignoring what *I* need.
If you modify the "# Required-Start:" line in the startup script in /etc/init.d it will cause SuSEconfig to stop $*&%$king with your custom start order. Ken