I'm using xmonad 0.10 with Ubuntu 11.10. I've switched to using SLiM and starting xmonad from my .xsession file.
Before switching to using .xsession to start xmonad, I used it in conjunction with Gnome, and starting it from .gnomerc. This was slow, and did not enable me to use the latest version of xmonad. However, it had the side benefit of being able to logout gracefully and being able to shutdown/restart directly from within the session without needing to put in a sudo or root password.
What I mean by "graceful logout" is that applications that are currently running do not think that the machine died unexpectedly. The most prominent example of that is Firefox and Chrome. If they are running while I hit M-S-q (which runs: "io (exitWith ExitSuccess)"), next time I log in they show me the "I crashed last time, do you want to restore?" message.
Currently to shut down my machine, I need to log out, and then shutdown/restart using the login manager, which is annoying. Both this and logout used to work from gnome-do's session management commands. Which I'm guessing is intertwined with Gnome, that I am no longer using.
What is the best way to logout, shutdown, and restart from with xmonad?