Resend, as the original mail was never moderated through (the attached patch was too big). So this is what I ended up with: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hadess/idle-inhibition-spec/ Patch for xdg-specs available at: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hadess/0001-Add-idle-inhibit-D-Bus-service-spec.patch Patches welcome.