hwt@.bnr.ca (Henry Troup) (06/29/90)
In article <1990Jun21.031248.3031@smsc.sony.com> dce@Sony.COM (David Elliott) writes: > 1. Have a call to the server to find the amount of idle time. A > program could then ask for idle time every few (user-specified) > minutes and decide what to do. > > 2. Implement an extension that sends an event to the root window > when the standard screensaver would be invoked, allowing a > client to register for that event. I received the following from Tim Theisen <tim@cs.wisc.edu> I have written an extension for the X server that returns the idle time. I first wrote it for R3. When Henry asked about R4, I had just completed changes for R4. The availability of the new version was not widely know. Xidle is available from expo.lcs.mit.edu. The filename is contrib/xidle.shar.Z We have a system called CONDOR that queries the X server for idle time as part of the test of whether the workstation is idle. (CONDOR runs jobs on otherwise idle workstations.) But as Guy Harris points out, it is not part of the standard protocol and therefor no guaranteed to be present in the X server. CONDOR also has a fall back mechanism that it uses when the X idle extension is not available. It periodically does a passive grap on the keyboard. When a key event comes, it records the time, sends the key event to the appropriate client and exits. The more frequent the period, the more accurate the idle time will be at the cost of overhead during the periods of keyboard usage. I prefer the using the extension to determine idle time (of course :-). However, if there is sufficient interest, I could probably post the keyboard watching daemon from CONDOR. ...Tim Tim Theisen Department of Computer Sciences tim@cs.wisc.edu University of Wisconsin-Madison uwvax!tim 1210 West Dayton Street (608)262-0438 Madison, WI 53706 So there it is - NOTE I didn't write it! -- Henry Troup - BNR owns but does not share my opinions | Not one of 100% of ..uunet!bnrgate!hwt%bwdlh490 HWT@BNR.CA 613-765-2337 | Americans