There is a package dbus-scripts that provides this functionality, but is not user level. You need to generate a config file to get a script running as a result of specific dbus signals, and you need to write scripts to do what you want. There is also a package dbus-scripts-settings that provides a GUI for the event selection part. For example. you can easily do something like: "run script x when touch screen is unlocked". What you want seems to be something like: write a lot of scripts for various actions, and modify dbus-scripts-settings to allow user to select action (such as "change skype status to offline") instead of a script file, and have the program select the script accordingly. See here for some details: http://wiki.maemo.org/DbusScripts .