Walking around half open

I've just had a bug reported:

At Ottawa Linux Symposium, it was common to see people walking around with
their laptops half-open because they didn't want them to sleep. Whether wardriving, Web serving, or music playing, some people do not want their PCs to sleep.

I cast my mind back to GUADEC, and sure enough I can remember an entrance hall full of people walking about with half-open laptops. This made me smile.

I figured I could use the inhibit applet for people to use for a “don't do what you normally do” type action.

So now we have a new toy. With gnome-power-manager from SVN you can add the standard  “inhibit” applet into the panel, click the button, shut the lid and walk over to show someone your new coolness.

But wait! Some laptops melt or get rather hot when you do this. So just in case we have the following warning that is displayed when you manually inhibit and you have either suspend or hibernate configured as the battery lid close action.

New warning…

So, maybe for GUADEC this year we'll see less half-open laptops…