Ubuntu Screen Lock

Question

When I lock screen on Ubuntu, I want transmission to open up automatically, and when I unlock the screen, transmission should pause itself or die.

I have searched a lot but cannot find anything worthwhile.

I thought of a solution, of creating a cron job and using gnome-screensaver-command -q and starting up transmission, seems like a wastage. Is there a better way (something event based)?

Answer 1

You can use dbus to get hold of the events when the screensaver activates or deactivates, see here.

You can use transmission-remote to control transmission from the command line, as shown here.

Therefore you will end up with a perl script along the lines of:

my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver',member='ActiveChanged'\"";

$starttrans="transmission-remote --torrent all --start";
$stoptrans="transmission-remote --torrent all --stop";

open (IN, "$cmd |");

while (<IN>) {
    if (m/^\s+boolean true/) {
        starttrans;
    } elsif (m/^\s+boolean false/) {
        stoptrans;
    }
}

(I'm writing this in Windows with no perl/ transmission so it is almost certainly not going to work properly.)

Answer 2

Ok. I have come up with a python script which does what I want using dbus-monitor

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys

while True:
    line = sys.stdin.readline()
    if "boolean true" in line:
        print os.system("transmission -m &")
    elif "boolean false" in line:
        print os.system("pkill transmission")

On the shell,

dbus-monitor type=signal,\
             interface=org.gnome.ScreenSaver,\
             member=ActiveChanged\
             | ./script.py  &