This post is mainly just to announce that the student lab machines can now be woken from sleep in the way one might reasonably expect: with a key press or mouse click.

Previously they could only be woken by pressing the machine’s power button. As the author of the LCFG sleep component which configures these machines’ automatic sleeping and waking, this deficiency irritated me beyond measure, but it took a long time to find out how to remedy it.

The configuration trick is written up in slightly more detail on my blog.

The automatic sleep support, by the way, is present by default on our student lab DICE machines, but not on staff or postgrad personal desktops. We omitted automatic sleep configuration from personal DICE machines because we reckoned that folk often want to login to their own machine remotely, for example from home, and we currently lack a facility to wake up a sleeping machine from a remote location. (Incidentally, the Support FAQ has a section on remote access.)

However if you’d like your machine to sleep while it’s not being used, please ask Support, and we’ll configure your machine to do that.

With ever increasing interest in power saving, we intend to do more work in this area in the next few months. Watch this space.

Edit: with impeccable comic timing, the latest Linux kernel for f13 breaks the support for waking a sleeping machine with keyboard or mouse. However I think I’ve identified a solution and I’m working on a fix. For more details see LCFG bug 408. Re-edit: now fixed!

A short post about sleep / Computing Systems by is licensed under a