Making Use Of Idle Workstation

Speaking of lowered expectations; here's something you may really like.....or not.

Have you ever given thought to the amount of computational horsepower your machine packs and how much of it is wasted when not in use? I thought it would be useful to write a script that could interrogate the current state of a Linux workstation to determine if it was available to run some background activities, similar to SETI desktop behavior. 

Seems determining if the screensaver is active is a pretty good indicator of whether a user is currently using the system. Bundle that with evaluation of the system load and you can get a pretty good indication of an idle system. 

Following is a Tcl-script that determines if the system screen saver is active. One could imaging bundling this will suspending/resuming a process or virtual machine to make use of the idle time. 

Let me know what you think and usages you may think of. 

#!/usr/bin/tclsh



proc isScreenSaverRunning { } {

  set response [exec gnome-screensaver-command -q]

# puts $response

  foreach e [split $response \n] {

    switch -glob -- $e {

      "* inactive"

       {

         set running 0

       }

      "* active"

       {

         set running 1

       }

      default

       {

       }

    }

  }

  return $running

}



proc check { } {

  set running [isScreenSaverRunning]

  if { $running } {

    puts "screen saver running"

    exit

  }

  after 1000 [list check]

}



#-----main------

after 1000 [list check]

vwait forever

Enjoy!