dexedrine/Readme.md

Dexedrine - A simple way to keep your system up

Dependencies

• libsystemd
• libbsd
• A C compiler (although this may only work with GCC)

How to use

• Run make
• Move the binary to somewhere in your PATH (or run make install)
• Run dexedrine
  • Your system will now be blocked from suspending, going idle, and it will ignore the lid switch
  • To stop it either:
    • Run dexedrine again (if you started it outside of a terminal) it will find the running instance and send it a SIGINT for you.
    • Send SIGINT to dexedrine.

Advanced usage

You can also run dexedrine as a systemd user service

systemctl --user start dexedrine.service

Backstory

This is by all means a very dumb program, All it does is take out an inhibitor on systemd to prevent your device from going idle, suspending, or handling its lid switch.

I wrote it to solve a problem that I had in a way that made sense to me. I wanted to turn off a monitor connected to my laptop without it realising it was no longer connected to it, and as such re-reading the lid switch and suspending.

While I could just disable sleep altogether when connected to power I figured it would be easier if I could control when sleep could happen and when it couldn't.

My original solution was much more basic, just running systemd-inhibit with a long running program inside it. First I tried using yes but the constant flood of output to stdout completely consumes a single core of my CPU. I then thought about just using any program but that's a waste of resources.

As such I decided to learn the basics of dBus in C and wrote Dexedrine.

Why the Name?

Dexedrine is named for a brand of dextroamphetamine originally from 1937. Dextroamphetamine is a potent CNS stimulant inspiring, in my opinion, a clever name.