[Sheflug] Simulating Activity to Stay Awake

[James Wallbank <james [at] xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,

I've been messing with activating programs directly with xinit, so that 
something can run straight away when a machine is powered on, without 
anyone logging in. I'm planning a series of keyboardless and mouseless 
non-interactive machines to act as a giant display.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to suppress screen-blanking! It's not a BIOS 
issue - I've upgraded the BIOS. It's also not a window manager problem - 
I'm running X, but NOT running a window manager,

The problem is that kapmd is running - it's compiled into the kernel, 
not loaded as a module (isn't that what [square brakets] around a 
process listed with 'ps fax' means?) I don't think kapmd is in any way 
configurable without a kernel recompile.

The right way to solve this problem would be to recompile the kernel 
without kapmd support built in - but I haven't got all day - especially 
for 96 machines! (Which is the planned display size).

A horrid little hack (my favourite!) would be to kid the machine that 
there is user activity every few minutes, by piping a signal to a device 
file that simulates keyboard or mouse input. Does anyone know how to do 
this?

Thanks,

James
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