Screensavers

Posted Fri, 2006-10-13 18:57 by meta4r

Ron down at the computer repair shop showed me this trick on his Red Hat system to run screensavers as a desktop background. Works on Ubuntu also.

From the settings program open "desktop/behavior" check the field to "allow programs in desktop window".
Open terminal and navigate to cd /usr/lib/xscreensaver
Enter dir and select a filename.
Insert filename into this code ./filename -root &
The ampersand at the end sends the command to the background and gives you a pid number. Type kill replacewithpid# to stop the process.
Depending on the capabilty of your system, you may be able to run multiple screensavers at the same time.
entering ./filename --help will give you more options for individual screensavers.

Webcollage is an xscreensaver that grabs images from the web and uses them to form a collage in the root window.

Assuming you are still in the /usr/lib/xscreensaver directory enter ./webcollage -root -dictionary /usr/share/dict/american-english to run. Note that you can use your preferred dictionary by specifying the path.
If webcollage will not run, you probably need to sudo apt-get install netpbm libjpeg-progs

Comments

by meta4r - 2006-10-15 00:32

I liked webcollage so much I decided to make a quicklauncher for it.

I wanted it in my top menu bar so I right clicked on the bar and selected "add application to menubar/add non-kde application" from the context menu.
In the just opened configuration box, name the button and give it a description if you so choose
put /usr/lib/xscreensaver/webcollage in the executable text box and put -root -dictionary /usr/share/dict/american-english & in the command line arguments text box.
click the icon in the configuration box to choose a preferred icon.

by Tom Sanderson - 2006-10-20 13:36

hi, i'am new here. I received my password after big time. Everything fine with your server?