Screensavers in FC3

[Behdad Esfahbod]

In fact one of the basic reasons to move some screensavers out
has been that the OpenGL ones (at least) can keep CPU usage on
100% on many machines, which contributes to the bill to pay and
for many laptops it increases the temperature considerably.

behdad

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Powell, James F CONT wrote:

> I think I through a monkey wrench in the discussion when I
> brought up that my jobsite requires a non-blank screen saver to
> be running on all platforms that are powered up.  Of course
> because of this, we also can't take advantage of power
> management since that would result in a blank screen as well.
>
> Jim Powell
> L3 Communications GSI
> Senior Scientist/Engineer
> AV-8B Weapons Integration
> james.f.powell at navy.mil <mailto:james.f.powell at navy.mil>
> (760)939-9089
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: fedora-desktop-list-bounces at redhat.com
> > [mailto:fedora-desktop-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Nils
> > Philippsen
> > Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 8:57
> > To: Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop
> > Subject: Re: Screensavers in FC3
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 14:20, Steven Garrity wrote:
> > > There was some talk a few months back about trimming down the
> > > screensavers in Fedora Core to a more sane number.
> > >
> > > First, there was the issue of 3D screensavers bogging down
> > machines that
> > > couldn't handle them:
> > >
> > https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2003-D
> > ecember/msg00088.html
> > >
> > > Then, I floated a proposal to pare down the included screensavers:
> > >
> > https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2004-F
> > ebruary/msg00002.html
> > >
> > > Then, Bill Nottingham had my favourite proposal yet for the
> > > screensavers:
> > >
> > https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2004-F
> ebruary/msg00006.html
> >
> > Bill Nottingham <notting redhat com> wrote:
> >  >
> >  > xscreensaver - blank only, core
> >  > xscreensaver-extras - everything else
> >  >
> >  > Simple, clean, avoids flamewars.
> >  >
> >
> > Has there been any progress on this? Is it too late to do something for FC3?
>
> >From my POV this whole issue is 80% rather trivial (packaging) with 20%
> coding that needs to be done before that can be the case:
>
> - xscreensaver needs to revert to "blank screen" if the user has chosen
> anything other than {disable screen saver, blank screen}, likewise
> xscreensaver-demo (which should rather be xscreensaver-config,
> ...-prefs, ...) should only let you enable or disable blanking in that
> case
> - xscreensaver needs another means than X11 resources to let the
> preferences tool know about the installed hacks, messing around with
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XScreenSaver is very cumbersome and
> bug-prone. Something like a directory /etc/xscreensaver/hacks.d where
> packages could just drop in small files describing their hacks would be
> best IMO
>
> Both of these are not that trivial and would need to be accepted
> upstream down the road -- we don't want to maintain such patches forever
>
> Nils
>

--behdad
  behdad.org