School of Informatics Computing Officer Chris Cooke has been working on the DICE sleep system recently, making it easier for machines to sleep whilst users are logged in. The system has been tested for a while and has now runs on all DICE desktops. Chris has also blogged about quantifying how much sleep machines are getting. The improved sleep system should save a considerable amount of electricity and the system is designed so that machines should stay awake whilst running long jobs, so there should be no disruption to work. Thanks to Chris for his work on this, and thanks also to the group of beta-testers who’ve helped Chris to refine the system.
If you want to see how much your machine is sleeping, I’ve written a couple of scripts (which work with GNOME) that notify you discretely when you unlock how much your machine slept yesterday. To use them download this zip file, unpack it, put the sleep-analyse and sleep-info scripts in ~/bin and put the sleep-info.desktop file in ~/.config/autostart .