What does "inactive" mean in "suspend when inactive for xxx mins"?
In system settings -> Power, what does "inactive" mean in "suspend when inactive for xxx mins"?
If my laptop am running a hours long backup program while i am sleeping, is that considered "inactive"?
If my laptop is running xdotools to simulate keys and mouse actions while I am away, is that considered "inactive"?
Thanks.
12 Answers
Inactive
No user interaction happened for the period of time specified.
A user interaction is a mouse movement, a button click, or a keyboard key pressed/released.
The settings allows for multiple levels of inactivity. First the screen saver is shown, a little later you can suspend/hibernate or minimize electricity use (i.e. make a PCI board go to a sleep mode like because it is not used for long periods of time.)
On a server, this can be a problem. Some servers allow for a Wake On LAN (WOL) setting in their BIOS / OS, but that takes a little while and many times the client will not wait long enough for the server to wake up.
Also, certain things such as network traffic can be considered to be a user activity. But I do not think that X11 offers that option. My server such goes to its screen saver even if the network runs full time all day.
2Not a direct answer to your question, but to prevent going into suspend (e.g. while running your backup script) there are inhibitors which can be set by gnome-session-inhibit or by directly calling the dbus method org.gnome.SessionManager /org/gnome/SessionManager org.gnome.SessionManager.Inhibit
$ gnome-session-inhibit --help
gnome-session-inhibit [OPTION...] COMMAND
Execute COMMAND while inhibiting some session functionality. -h, --help Show this help --version Show program version --app-id ID The application id to use when inhibiting (optional) --reason REASON The reason for inhibiting (optional) --inhibit ARG Things to inhibit, colon-separated list of: logout, switch-user, suspend, idle, automount --inhibit-only Do not launch COMMAND and wait forever instead
If no --inhibit option is specified, idle is assumed.
