Sleep and biscuits

Here is some great news from Chris Cooke (Computing Officer) about improvments to the sleep system on DICE desktops:

I’m looking for volunteers to help me test some energy-saving software.You will need to have a DICE computer already allocated to you.

Your reward will be the satisfaction of helping to reduce the School’s energy consumption, but in case that’s not enough, the first dozen people to respond can also relieve me of a Tortina chocolate biccie (“a heart of smoothest cream from the finest hazelnuts captured between two light and crisp wafers and then wrapped in exquisite milk chocolate”).

If you already have a DICE computer and you’d like to help, please replytelling me its name.

The software to be tested is a new version of lcfg-sleep, which decides when DICE desktops go to sleep and wake up. The main new feature of the test version is that it will send a machine to sleep while an X session is running, if that X session has been idle for long enough. (The current version, which runs on all DICE desktops, doesn’t sleep the machine at all if an X session is running.)

I’m not aware of any remaining bugs in the new version of lcfg-sleep, and it’s been running for some time now on computing staff desktops. However I’m not quite so sure whether it has the best possible configuration. I’d like to fine tune it to make sure that it doesn’t annoy people too much, for instance by being too quick to make the computer sleep.

If you take part, your duty will mainly be just to tell me what you think of the new sleep behaviour, especially if it annoys or inconveniences you. If you spot anything wrong please tell me about that too of course.

The software is documented at:
http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/sleep

and the new version’s differences are documented at:
http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/sleep#test

If you’d like to help please reply telling me the name of your DICE machine. Thanks.

And thanks to Chris for working on this. The test system has been running well for me for about a week now.

Image released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license by Chocablog.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Sleep and biscuits

  1. Pingback: Spring Sleep Roundup « What's Chris doing today?

Comments are closed.