Problems with Screensavers and other activity sensitive demons.

[Graeme Gill]

Lubos Lunak wrote:
>  Actually, to my best knowledge, none of this is true, except for "it's there" 
> and "it's documented". It's over-engineered, it's unmaintained and as a 
> consequence it's broken. You can have a look at 
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1419 for why the XScreenSaver 
> maintainer thinks it's broken, and if that's not enough I can dig in the KDE 
> screensaver for more. Screensaver apps are hacking around the extension or 
> just plain ignoring it because they have to.

Hmm. Sounds bad. I had a quick look through the xscreensaver source,
and I thought it was triggering from the XScreenSaver extension
events (and therefore should respond to XScreenSaverSuspend()),
but not having probed deeper, I'm not sure of this.
The GnomeSceensaver seemed to be patterned after xscreensaver,
so might behave similarly.

>  We already do have one :) , in fact we've had it for like 8 years at least. 
> And it should suspend when either DPMS or the XScreensaver extension are 
> suspended, so it's presumably missing from your list because nobody had to 
> complain about it.

Small sample set so far I think. Only a relative few are brave enough
to try color calibrating under X11 :-)

Another issue reported to do with screensavers is that some seem
to do their stuff using the video LUTs, but fail to
save and then restore the values, wrecking the screen
calibration. [ Possibly another forum is more appropriate
to raise this in though - the Xorg list ?]

>  As already said in another answer, your best choice at this moment should be 
> xdg-screensaver from xdg-utils.

OK, thanks, I'll look into it when I have a distro that actually has
the xdg-utils.

Graeme Gill.