Monday 6 March 2017

Today I saved the planet

Well, prolonged its demise a little.

My teenage son, despite repeated requests, frequently walks away from the computer leaving it running. And now that I've got a shiny new and very quiet computer it is not always obvious that it has been left running.

While formerly I would just changed the program the window manager invoked as a screensaver Linux systems have got a lot more convoluted. Whether this complexity is a good or necessary thing - I will reserve judgement.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the solution for me was to use xautolock which, once started, monitors for a period of inactivity then runs a program. Setting it to start automatically on my Mint / mate box (no XClients / Xsession) was a matter of adding a .desktop entry to the XDG autostart directory:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=xautolock -detectsleep -time 50 -locker "/sbin/shutdown -h now"
Hidden=false
X-MATE-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_GB]=xautolock
Name=xautolock
Comment[en_GB]=
Comment=