Detect Kiosk Idle

I wrote a small daemon to detect idle on irq lines. The irqidle can be used to detect mouse and keyboard idle. In kiosk setting the meaningful response for idle is to kill the X server.

To add the idle detection you need to edit your client's etc/xinitrc.

Add following line at the stage you want to turn the idle detection on:

irqidle -t 300 -k "Mouse,keyboard" -e "/etc/xinitrc.timeout"

The /etc/xinitrc.timeout refers to another script that actually kills the X. Naturally the name can be chosen. The timeout script could look like this:

echo "Don't leave me alone!" | gtk_popup &sleep 10 kill -TERM `cat /tmp/.X0-lock`

The first two lines are used to give a neat notice to the ignorant user using gtk_popup tool. The kill statements does the job.

When you want to turn the idle detection off you simply kill the daemon. The irqidle has switch -p which writes PID file to specified location, like /tmp/irqidle.pid.

Updated: 27-FEB-2004