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…

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

One thought on “Walking around half open”

  1. Another welcome change :) I'm not a GNOME user, but it's still good to see this kind of thing being warned about. I have an old iBook that I use as a server, and it's one of the ones that I can't close. Otherwise, it would be a GREAT server instead of just a very good one. I only stumbled on the news that I can't close it by chance though, so it could have easily been very hot for a very long time :/

Comments are closed.