Making Use Of Idle Workstation

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