Hello,

I'd like to save battery on my laptop and want to dynamically adjust the brightness of my display. Basically I'd like to have what Apple's i- and Powerbooks already do

The brightness itself can be easily changed with sonypi and spicctrl (I have a sony vaio).

However I'm struggling to find a way to get a signal when the user has been idle for n seconds. I've found some mailing lists suggesting g_idle_add. But this seems to be application specific and not what I have in mind. Another interesting thing might be the Xidle extensions. But I couldn't find any detailed information on how to use them on the map.

Can you give me some starting points?

Thanks in advance
Misel

I don't specifically know, but what I'd do is grab some XScreenSaver source and grep it for keywords like "idle", "timeout", and such. Then figure out how it does it. Or make a screensaver plugin for XScreenSaver so then you just need to have that installed and point it at some dimming commands (in a shell script). There may even be an "exec this" plugin for it already to run one command at blanking time and another on returning from blanking, I would think it'd be sort of a common thing one would want to do. Sorry I can't be of more specific help.

Have you ever seen an iBook or Powerbook in action. What they do is to dim down the monitor after about 30 seconds of no action from the user. And then some more after a longer period. Even before the screensaver completely disables the screen. But as soon as the user moves the mouse or presses a key it goes back to full brightness.

After my last post I had a glance at the xscreensaver source. But - as the creator himself admitted - the timer.c is a total mess. There doesn't seem to be one straight and obvious way to get the signals my program needs.