Circadian is a background daemon/service for triggering suspend/sleep/hibernate automatically when a computer is idle.
It is primarily for stationary devices with permanent power (i.e. desktops, servers, media centers).
Circadian uses a suite of 'idle heuristics' to determine when a system is idle. These include: * User activity in X11 (keyboard, mouse, full-screen playback) * User activity in terminals (typing in PTY/SSH session) * Open SSH connections * Open SMB/Samba connections * Active audio playback * CPU usage below specified threshold * Blacklisted processes
When all of its heuristics determine that your system has been idle for long enough, Circadian will execute a command. This is typically a simple power suspend, but it can be configured to any desired action.
Circadian can also schedule an automatic daily wakeup. Simply set a wake time in its configuration file and it will wake up once every day at that time (if not already awake). This allows an easy way to keep a machine updated and backed up, even if it is seldom used.
It can also execute a command when it detects that the system has woken up from sleep, regardless of why it woke up.
Circadian exists because modern Linux distros already support suspend-on-idle, but it is apparently a very buggy and unreliable domain. After you've followed your distro's advice of poking a handful of conf files, tweaking a few XML hierarchies, writing a few scripts, wafting the smoke of burning sage across your keyboard, suspending gem stones from your machine, and whatever else may be recommended... perhaps try Circadian.
"Works for me". You try. You give feedback on GitHub, or to trevor@trevorbentley.com.
$ sudo dpkg -i circadian_0.5.0-1_amd64.deb
Edit /etc/circadian.conf to configure. The default is to suspend with systemd after 2 hours of idle.
When you are happy with the config, continue:
$ sudo systemctl enable circadian
$ sudo systemctl start circadian
Install manually. It's easy.
$ git clone https://github.com/mrmekon/circadian.git
$ cd circadian
$ cargo build --release
$ sudo cp target/release/circadian /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo cp resources/circadian.conf.in /etc/circadian.conf
$ sudo cp resources/circadian.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/
$ sudo systemctl enable circadian
$ sudo systemctl start circadian
Follow systemd instructions, and port circadian.service to whatever format you want.
Auto-wake requires kernel support for the real-time clock (RTC). You can check for the file /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. You probably have it.
pkill -SIGUSR1 circadian will dump info to syslog. Use that to see if it's working, or find out why it isn't sleeping.