[ubuntu-nz] Gnome screensaver

[Andrew McMillan]

On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 21:59 +1300, Ray Smith wrote:
> Does anyone know of a good tutorial on writing screensavers for Gnome?
> Oddly enough one of the main reasons I haven't dropped Windows
> completely is a particular screensaver that has a special place in my
> heart. :D

The best starting point is probably to grab the source to xscreensaver
and take a look at some of the simpler screensavers in there.

I'm sure that a screensaver that is working with Xscreensaver can easily
be converted into a Gnome or KDE screensaver (or just run xscreensaver
instead of the Gnome one, which is what I do).

xscreensaver programs are standalone programs in their own right, which
just implement some standard options like -root to run on the root
window, and so on.  You can run them to output to a normal window, which
is helpful for testing, or you can run them to output to the root
window, perhaps giving you a moving desktop background rather than a
static one.

E.g. from the manpage for 'penrose' which is in the xscreensaver-data
package (built from the xscreensaver source package).


OPTIONS
   penrose accepts the following options:

   -window Draw on a newly-created window.  This is the default.

   -root   Draw on the root window.

   -mono   If on a color display, pretend we're on a monochrome display.

   -install
           Install a private colormap for the window.

   -visual visual
           Specify which visual to use.  Legal values are the name of
           a visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a
           specific visual.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
					Andrew.

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