The Universe of Disco

Controlling KDE screen locking from a shell script

Lately I've started watching stuff on Netflix. Every time I do this, the screen locker kicks in sixty seconds in, and I have to unlock it, pause the video, and adjust the system settings to turn off the automatic screen locker. I can live with this.

But when the show is over, I often forget to re-enable the automatic screen locker, and that I can't live with. So I wanted to write a shell script:

  #!/bin/sh
  auto-screen-locker disable
  sleep 3600
  auto-screen-locker enable

Then I'll run the script in the background before I start watching, or at least after the first time I unlock the screen, and if I forget to re-enable the automatic locker, the script will do it for me.

The question is: how to write auto-screen-locker?

strace

My first idea was: maybe there is actually an auto-screen-locker command, or a system-settings command, or something like that, which was being run by the System Settings app when I adjusted the screen locker from System Settings, and all I needed to do was to find out what that command was and to run it myself.

So I tried running System Settings under strace -f and then looking at the trace to see if it was execing anything suggestive.

It wasn't, and the trace was 93,000 lines long and frighting. Halfway through, it stopped recording filenames and started recording their string addresses instead, which meant I could see a lot of calls to execve but not what was being execed. I got sidetracked trying to understand why this had happened, and I never did figure it out—something to do with a call to clone, which is like fork, but different in a way I might understand once I read the man page.

The first thing the cloned process did was to call set_robust_list, which I had never heard of, and when I looked for its man page I found to my surprise that there was one. It begins:

    NAME
           get_robust_list, set_robust_list - get/set list of robust futexes

And then I felt like an ass because, of course, everyone knows all about the robust futex list, duh, how silly of me to have forgotten ha ha just kidding WTF is a futex? Are the robust kind better than regular wimpy futexes?

It turns out that Ingo Molnár wrote a lovely explanation of robust futexes which are actually very interesting. In all seriousness, do check it out.

I seem to have digressed. This whole section can be summarized in one sentence:

strace was no help and took me a long way down a wacky rabbit hole.

Sorry, Julia!

Stack Exchange

The next thing I tried was Google search for kde screen locker. The second or third link I followed was to this StackExchange question, “What is the screen locking mechanism under KDE? It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it was suggestive and pointed me in the right direction. The crucial point in the answer was a mention of

    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver Lock

When I saw this, it was like a new section of my brain coming on line. So many things that had been obscure suddenly became clear. Things I had wondered for years. Things like “What are these horrible

   Object::connect: No such signal org::freedesktop::UPower::DeviceAdded(QDBusObjectPath)

messages that KDE apps are always spewing into my terminal?” But now the light was on.

KDE is built atop a toolkit called Qt, and Qt provides an interprocess communication mechanism called “D-Bus”. The qdbus command, which I had not seen before, is apparently for sending queries and commands on the D-Bus. The arguments identify the recipient and the message you are sending. If you know the secret name of the correct demon, and you send it the correct secret command, it will do your bidding. ( The mystery message above probably has something to do with the app using an invalid secret name as a D-Bus address.)

Often these sorts of address hierarchies work well in theory and then fail utterly because there is no way to learn the secret names. The X Window System has always had a feature called “resources” by which almost every aspect of every application can be individually customized. If you are running xweasel and want just the frame of just the error panel of just the output window to be teal blue, you can do that… if you can find out the secret names of the xweasel program, its output window, its error panel, and its frame. Then you combine these into a secret X resource name, incant a certain command to load the new resource setting into the X server, and the next time you run xweasel the one frame, and only the one frame, will be blue.

In theory these secret names are documented somewhere, maybe. In practice, they are not documented anywhere. you can only extract them from the source, and not only from the source of xweasel itself but from the source of the entire widget toolkit that xweasel is linked with. Good luck, sucker.

D-Bus has a directory

However! The authors of Qt did not forget to include a directory mechanism in D-Bus. If you run

    qdbus

you get a list of all the addressable services, which you can grep for suggestive items, including org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver. Then if you run

    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver

you get a list of all the objects provided by the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver service; there are only seven. So you pick a likely-seeming one, say /ScreenSaver, and run

    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver

and get a list of all the methods that can be called on this object, and their argument types and return value types. And you see for example

    method void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Lock()

and say “I wonder if that will lock the screen when I invoke it?” And then you try it:

    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver Lock

and it does.

That was the most important thing I learned today, that I can go wandering around in the qdbus hierarchy looking for treasure. I don't yet know exactly what I'll find, but I bet there's a lot of good stuff.

When I was first learning Unix I used to wander around in the filesystem looking at all the files, and I learned a lot that way also.

• “Hey, look at all the stuff in /etc! Huh, I wonder what's in /etc/passwd?”

• “Hey, /etc/protocols has a catalog of protocol numbers. I wonder what that's for?”

• “Hey, there are a bunch of files in /usr/spool/mail named after users and the one with my name has my mail in it!”

• “Hey, the manuals are all under /usr/man. I could grep them!”

Later I learned (by browsing in /usr/man/man7) that there was a hier(7) man page that listed points of interest, including some I had overlooked.

The right secret names

Everything after this point was pure fun of the “what happens if I turn this knob” variety. I tinkered around with the /ScreenSaver methods a bit (there are twenty) but none of them seemed to be quite what I wanted. There is a

    method uint Inhibit(QString application_name, QString reason_for_inhibit)

method which someone should be calling, because that's evidently what you call if you are a program playing a video and you want to inhibit the screen locker. But the unknown someone was delinquent and it wasn't what I needed for this problem.

Then I moved on to the /MainApplication object and found

    method void org.kde.KApplication.reparseConfiguration()

which wasn't quite what I was looking for either, but it might do: I could perhaps modify the configuration and then invoke this method. I dimly remembered that KDE keeps configuration files under $HOME/.kde, so I ls -la-ed that and quickly found share/config/kscreensaverrc, which looked plausible from the outside, and more plausible when I saw what was in it:

  Enabled=True
  Timeout=60

among other things. I hand-edited the file to change the 60 to 243, ran

    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /MainApplication reparseConfiguration

and then opened up the System Settings app. Sure enough, the System Settings app now reported that the lock timeout setting was “4 minutes”. And changing Enabled=True to Enabled=False and back made the System Settings app report that the locker was enabled or disabled.

The answer

So the script I wanted turned out to be:

    timeout=${1:-3600}
    perl -i -lpe 's/^Enabled=.*/Enabled=False/' $HOME/.kde/share/config/kscreensaverrc
    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /MainApplication  reparseConfiguration
    sleep $timeout
    perl -i -lpe 's/^Enabled=.*/Enabled=True/' $HOME/.kde/share/config/kscreensaverrc
    qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /MainApplication  reparseConfiguration

Problem solved, but as so often happens, the journey was more important than the destination.

I am greatly looking forward to exploring the D-Bus hierarchy and sending all sorts of inappropriate messages to the wrong objects.

Just before he gets his ass kicked by Saruman, that insufferable know-it-all Gandalf says “He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” If I had been Saruman, I would have kicked his ass at that point too.

Addendum

Right after I posted this, I started watching Netflix. The screen locker cut in after sixty seconds. “Aha!” I said. “I'll run my new script!”

I did, and went back to watching. Sixty seconds later, the screen locker cut in again. My script doesn't work! The System Settings app says the locker has been disabled, but it's mistaken. Probably it's only reporting the contents of the configuration file that I edited, and the secret sauce is still missing. The System Settings app does something to update the state of the locker when I click that “Apply” button, and I thought that my qdbus command was doing the same thing, but it seems that it isn't.

I'll figure this out, but maybe not today. Good night all!

[ Addendum 20160728: I figured it out the next day ]

[ Addendum 20160729: It has come to my attention that there is actually a program called xweasel. ]

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