Re: [AD] Disable screensaver

[Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 06 November 2008, Peter Wang wrote:
> On 2008-11-06, Elias Pschernig <elias.pschernig@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 21:36 +1100, Peter Wang wrote:
> > > > What about
> > > > http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-screensaver.html ?
> > >
> > > Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do anything for the native X
> > > screensaver system, which is the only one I actually care about
> > > (anything other than blanking the screen is stupid).
> > >
> > > I made the X port call XResetScreenSaver() every 10 seconds, which
> > > seems to do the trick.  I don't really know what the effect of that
> > > function call is, as the man page says, and I'm quoting the whole thing
> > > here:
> > >
> > >     The XResetScreenSaver function resets the screen saver.
> > >
> > > Nice.
> >
> > Well, I can confirm that it does not work here in Gnome.
> >
> > However, my current version of mplayer also does not have it working,
> > but looking at google it seems it will be fixed in a future version
> > using D-Bus (
> > http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5371
> > ). I don't have time right now to add this to A5 though, and not sure if
> > using D-Bus in A5 is a good idea.
> >
> > Anyway, maybe someone can test it with KDE? If it doesn't work there as
> > well, XResetScreenSaver() certainly seems worthless.
>
> On further research (browsing mplayer mailing list archives) it seems
> XResetScreenSaver() _is_ the right thing to do, but XScreenSaver,
> gnome-screensaver, etc. are broken crap which don't respect the
> standard.
>
> I think we should not clutter the Allegro source with code paths to
> support every non-standard screensaver program out there, especially if
> they involve further dependencies.  But I realise there are a lot of
> systems using these pieces of crap, so we can't just ignore them.
>
> Instead, we could move all that junk into a shell script that Allegro
> calls.  When al_inhibit_screensaver() is first called, we call the shell
> script to detect which screensaver program is in use, which it returns
> via the exit code.  Then, periodically, we'll call the shell script with
> the detected screensaver program as an argument, whose job it is to do
> the equivalent of XResetScreenSaver() for whatever piece of crap is
> running.  If we detect no piece of crap running, we can just call
> XResetScreenSaver().
>
> Peter

I'm not sure what you mean by the "native" screensaver. The little moving X 
logo? or DPMS?

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx