[TriLUG] Disable Some Screensavers

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Wed Jul 27 13:01:10 EDT 2005


On 7/27/05, Tanner Lovelace <clubjuggler at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/27/05, David W. Aquilina <david at starkindler.us> wrote:
> > Instructions for removing KDE's control over the screensaver and using the normal (and sane) mecahnism can be found at http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html#10
> 
> Actually, those instructions look more like a hack to me than using
> KDE's screensavers.  Why would I want to disable KDE functionality, which
> is fully integrated into the KDE desktop and use a 3rd party application
> which doesn't integrate?

Well, it actually looks to me like it's a hack on top of a hack. The
KDE screensaver seems to be a wrapper on top of xscreensaver. Instead
of using xscreensaver-demo to control things they've put a UI into
Control Center, which does some, but not all of what xscreensaver-demo
does.

> But, a quick google search found the solution to Brian's problem.
> Search for the 2nd (or was it 3rd?) occurance of the word "random" on
> http://www.ep.ph.bham.ac.uk/general/support/linux9custom.html
> and you'll see that you just need to find the directory with the KDE
> screensavers (on my Kubuntu system it seems to be
> /usr/share/applnk/System/ScreenSavers) and rename any of the
> files to not have a .desktop extension.  This will disable the screensaver
> and it will not be selected by the random screensaver mode.

Interestingly enough on my Kubuntu system (which was installed by
apt-get kubuntu-desktop on an ubuntu system), the very prominent
Utilities>Screensaver menu item brings up xscreensaver-demo whereas I
had to scratch my head a bit before I found the screensaver interface
under Control Center (why that isn't Kontrol Center is beyond me).
Even then the Random screensaver wasn't obvious, it just is one of a
long list of screen savers. xscreensaver-demo  on the other hand gives
four screen saver mode choices, disabled, blank screen only, only one
screen saver, and random screen saver. If you select random screen
saver you can then select which screensavers are selectable using
checkboxes.

So even though the KDE screen saver is fully integrated into the KDE
desktop, much of the control has been sucked down into the bowels of
the KDE mechanisms.

So it's the user's choice of which form of hackery he want's to use to
control which random screensavers he wants.



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