Gnome Power Manager Inhibit and UnInhibit

Gnome Power Manager has a preference allowing the user to have their machine suspend or hibernate after the machine has been idle for a certain time. This allows the machine to conserve power when it is not in use.

The difficulty is that a lack of mouse or keyboard activity does not necessarily equate to "session not in use" and the machine may suspend when it is undertaking a long task (e.g. copying large files) or performing an activity requiring no input from the user (e.g. playing music).

From version 2.15, Gnome Power Manager allows applications to call Inhibit and UnInhibit DBUS methods. This allows the applications to tell GPM that the system is busy even if there is no user input. This will not prevent the machine suspending when power is low but will prevent the system suspending for the reason that it is not being used.

Information on these methods can be found at http://live.gnome.org/GnomePowerManager/Faq#head-ec399a12ba6d1a8461e5d6af7394d9560a838bc4

Please note: there is a different call to prevent the screensaver from coming on. That call also prevents GPM from suspending and should be used when the user will be using the screen without the mouse or keyboard (e.g. a video call or playing a movie). Perhaps a separate page for these situations is appropriate. The GPM call is for situations when the screensaver coming on (or the screen turning off) will not affect the operation of the application.

More info:

• http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334809

This page aims to be a central place for information on, and implentation of, this feature. It may be useful to include a link to this page when requesting the feature.

Occassions in Ubuntu when Inhibit should be used

This is a list to track the implementation of this feature in Ubuntu. Please add the situations in which you believe the feature should be invoked. Ideal situations are things that could run for longer than 5 minutes unattended and do not need the screen to remain on. Please try to keep this list in alphabetical order.

Created by LunaTick.