Posts Tagged ‘gnome-power-manager’
Go with the flow
I’ve been thinking about and exploring possible solutions to the problem I mentioned in my last post.
The more I read about DBus, Gnome and HAL the more I realise that I should be working with them rather than subverting them with lcfg-sleep. They detect the idleness of a user’s X session far more easily than I can, they have sophisticated tie-ins with other software via DBus (a common example is that a DVD player application can ask the screensaver to refrain from screen-saving while a film is playing), and gnome-power-manager has facilities I could use for setting default (overridden by user preferences) and mandatory (overrides user preferences) behaviour in matters such as automatically suspending a machine after the session has become idle. They also support use of the same display quirks which I’ve had to use with lcfg-sleep to get displays up and running again at resume time – and today I’ve tried enabling quirks in HAL then suspending with Gnome’s suspend method and they work, they bring the display back to a working state after resume, which isn’t what happens when the right quirk is not enabled.
Anyway, enough about quirks and stuff; the main idea is this. When it runs lcfg-sleep should detect whether or not there’s a user X session, and if there is, lcfg-sleep will refrain from suspending the machine. Instead it’ll back off to fallback behaviour of just calculating a suitable wake time for the machine and writing that to the kernel wake time file. Gnome-power-manager can be trusted to do the idleness detection and suspension. We can set default preferences for it to suspend the machine a suitable number of minutes after it judges the session to have become idle. Resume will happen thanks to the wake time which lcfg-sleep will have written to the kernel alarm file before suspend. lcfg-sleep doesn’t get triggered by gnome-power-manager or anything, it just runs regularly, every minute or two, and writes a suitable time to the kernel alarm file every time it runs; so there should always be a correct wake time (for example, in the future rather than the past) in the kernel alarm file. I’ve tested using gnome-power-manager’s suspension in conjunction with lcfg-sleep’s waketime and it works. (Well, it works as long as you set the proper display quirks in a HAL quirk database file anyway.)
When there’s no user X session detected, lcfg-sleep can revert to its fuller behaviour of triggering suspend as well as setting wakeup time.
We could even perhaps base relevant gnome-power-manager default values on similar lcfg-sleep resource values. The gnome default values are set using gconf, and James has a handy lcfg-gconf component in the repository…