The sorry state of screensavers ?

Question

There are a few areas that are in a sorry state in linux and one of them seem to be screensavers. It's just one big mess.
So, in my experience:
gnome-screensaver doesn't work outside of gnome (the computer can be idle for an hour and it won't kick in)
xscreensaver causes a MASSIVE 2-4 seconds X lag when starting up (I can't even move the mouse smoothly)
I haven't tried KDE's screensaver as I don't have it or any part of KDE installed.
And there doesn't seem to be a standard way for video players to temporarily deactivate a screensaver. (Although that isn't a problem with gnome-screensaver (see above) but it is with xscreensaver.) So whatever you choose you lose ?
Now to make this post more than a rant, I did write a wrapper script for a video player that stops xscreensaver and restarts it when the video player is done but did I mention the MASSIVE lag when starting xscreensaver? Then I modified that script so it executes 'xscreensaver -deactivate' (that seems to send a signal of activiy) every 4 minutes and 50 seconds if the video player is still running, but then again, due to that sleep time it happens that I can't eject a disc I just watched a video from due to it still being in use by the script.
So I guess I can ask two questions:
Why does xscreensaver lag so much ? Or is it only on my system ?
How could I make a more intelligent wrapper script then ?
Here is the simple bash script:
#!/bin/bash
# What player to use:
videoCmd="smplayer"
"$videoCmd" "$@" &
while true; do
sleep 290
if ps -au$UID | grep -v grep | grep $videoCmd > /dev/null; then
/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -deactivate
else
exit
fi
done
EDIT: Also, I did try mplayer's hearbeat command and that lagged the video occasionally (Googling, I have seen other people stating this as well, so I guess it's a known issue with mplayer)
Last edited by moljac024 (2009-10-29 19:12:45)

Answer 1

moljac024 wrote:There are a few areas that are in a sorry state in linux and one of them seem to be screensavers. It's just one big mess.
That depends on whether you're considering screen lockers as well as screen savers.  There are a few fool-proof screen lockers out there, one of which (my personal favourite) is slock from the suckless community.
moljac024 wrote:
And there doesn't seem to be a standard way for video players to temporarily deactivate a screensaver. (Although that isn't a problem with gnome-screensaver (see above) but it is with xscreensaver.) So whatever you choose you lose ?
EDIT: Also, I did try mplayer's hearbeat command and that lagged the video occasionally (Googling, I have seen other people stating this as well, so I guess it's a known issue with mplayer)
How about mplayer's -stop-xscreensaver option?  You can try adding this to ~/.mplayer/config:
[default]
stop-xscreensaver=1 # disable xscreensaver