kiosk

Power down a headless mini?

sbn..'s picture

Hey again.

As discussed in this topic, i'm doing an installation involving some hardware sensors and a Mac Mini.

I've gotten quite far, and everything looks good - except I want the computer to be able to be powered down in the normal manner (no force power off / hold power button). The people running the gallery need to be able to reboot if there's any trouble, and shut down for the night. A keyboard won't fit in the installation.

Is there any good way to bypass what Apple calls the "power key window", the one that comes up when the power button is pressed? The one that offers the option to "Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down"? Ideally, one press of the power button should initiate a normal shutdown directly.

I've looked at UIMode from Carbon, but that simply has the ability to make the power button non-functional. I'm doing a fullscreen app from a modified Apple sample and am not afraid to get my hands dirty with some Obj-C. I'm also not afraid of reading documentation, but can find nothing further on this.

The simple way would be to hand the installation guys a keyboard, and tell them to plug it in before powering down. But that just seems inelegant when all that's needed is one press of the enter key.

Thoughts and anecdotes are, as always, appreciated.