Study and implementation of polisave client for Linux

This project is written with the purpose to find a solution to the high levels of energy consumption that there are nowadays. The current proliferation of network devices that are continuously powered on produces an urgent need to think about a simple and effective way to reduce their power consumption. We find out that most people prefer to leave their PCs always on; this mainly dues to the little sensibility that people have toward the cost of keeping a PC on and the cost of both, in terms of time and technical skill, to properly and quickly switch on and off a PC. These somehow surprising facts suggested us to design a solution able to control the power state of PCs in the Campus, explicitly targeting the ease of use. The result is Polisave, a centralized web-based architecture which allows users to schedule power state of their PCs; the server remotely triggers power-up and power-down events by piloting a custom software which has to be installed in each PC. This thesis is based on the realization of Polisave for Linux. This project examines how to perform actions to turn on, suspend, hibernate or shut down computers with Linux through the programming. There is also a great survey of two complex technologies such as HAL, which allows obtaining the hardware characteristics of a computer and DBUS, which allows multiple applications to communicate. It also analyses other simple but important technologies in the Linux software such as logs, daemons, GUI... Therefore, the result of this thesis is not only a software to perform energy saving actions, but a small study with examples of technologies which can help anyone interested in learning these technologies