gdmflexiserver questions

Reid Rivenburgh reidr at pobox.com
Thu May 8 15:58:50 UTC 2008


Hi.  I'm hoping someone out there knows the answer to this, or can
point me to some good docs.  I'm trying to use gdmflexiserver to
handle a situation where there's one user always logged in (me) and
another that may log in occasionally.  I found out about
gdmflexiserver, which generally works very well to "log me out",
locking the screen and managing things like audio.  What it doesn't
seem to do, though, is turn the monitor off via DPMS when it starts a
new gdm login display.  This may sound trivial, but I'm trying to keep
electricity use and costs down; I hate coming back to the machine
after a day and seeing the monitor still on!

It seems like the reason for it not working is because it's reusing
some existing display that has DPMS enabled, but when switching to it
from a different VT, it thinks the gdm display has already logically
turned the monitor off.  If I hit a key, it restarts whatever timer
the DPMS uses, and then eventually the monitor will turn off.  The
problem is that I'm not always there to hit a key, or I may forget to
hit a key.

Some questions:

1. Does the above hypothesis sound right?

2. What is the difference between "gdmflexiserver" and "gdmflexiserver
-s"?  It sounds like the -s flag will make it start a new server,
which should solve the problem, but it doesn't seem to do that.
(Bonus points if you can explain "--monte-carlo-pi"!)  At the moment,
it is definitely starting a new X server when I run gdmflexiserver -s;
it quickly shows the gdm greeter, than takes several seconds to
restart X.  I don't know why it started doing that yesterday.

3. Is there any way to know which DISPLAY the gdmflexiserver started?
If I could query that, then maybe I could create a script that runs
gdmflexiserver, sleeps for awhile, and then does a "xset dpms force
off".  I can't test it right now because of 2, but maybe that would
work regardless of the value of DISPLAY....

4. Do the /etc/gdm/Init/Default and related sibling directory scripts
get run when running gdmflexiserver?  From my testing, it seems like
they don't, but this may be because it's reusing a display and
basically just switching VTs.  But if there was a script I knew would
be run whenever gdmflexiserver does its thing, that would be nice.

5. I don't really understand what the "--command=" interface in
gdm/gdmflexiserver does.  It seems anything I've put in there gives me
"no longer supported".  That could be key to a solution, though.

6. xautolock, which checks for an idle X server and runs an arbitrary
command, stopped working correctly at some point, maybe when I
upgraded to F9 alpha from F8 (though I changed computers in there,
too).  It never runs the idle program.  Someone suggested (thanks)
using a dbus-based solution that does indeed work and is probably
fine, but I'm wondering why xautolock would never think the X server
is idle?

I've asked similar questions before, and in fact it seemed like this
was working until recently.  Maybe an X update changed something?  I'm
running the current rawhide and the open nv driver, if it matters.
Thanks for any pointers!

Reid

P.S.  Apologies if this is too long, off-topic, or esoteric....




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