[ale] linux screen saver

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:30:56 -0600
"John G. Heim" <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:

> We rundebian linux and I've discovered that by default, it turns on a
> screen saver that requires the user to re-enter a password if the
> console is idle long enough. But I need the screen to go blank if
> nobody logs in for 5 or 10 minutes. Googling showed me lots of ways
> to configure a screen saver for a user but that' means it would work
> only after a user logs in.

I am not sure how you would implement that at present without some
programming.  However, I could be wrong:  A *lot* of new functionality
has come to GNOME-based systems in recent times, and something like
this may already exist there that I am not aware of and cannot find.

That said, I think that the best way to go about this would be (if you
have some programming skill) implementing some additional functionality
to do just this.  There are a few ways to go about it:

  * Implement some system-wide program that will automatically be run
    every time someone starts a GNOME session, watching for inactivity
    and kicking off the Fast User Switching functionality in GNOME
    after a set time-out,
  * Implement some system-wide program that will automatically be run
    every time someone starts a GNOME session, watching for inactivity,
    letting the screen saver come on, and then kicking off the Fast
    User Switching functionality in GNOME, when there is activity after
    a specified amount of inactivity (this mimics the way Windows XP
    Professional seems to work by default),
  * Or implement something with either of the above points, within the
    gnome-screensaver software itself, and using GConf to store its
    configuration data so that the system administrator can implement
    *some* required functionality in a system (e.g., maximum timeout
    for the screensaver which would be implementing the feature to
    begin with).

I don't know how hard any of those would be, but I would imagine not
terribly hard if you are already a C programmer.  I can't seem to find
any indication that a similar feature has been requested in GNOME or
that it has already been implemented, so I am fairly sure that someone
will have to write it.

> I'm sorry I'm kind of ignorant of gnome & gdm. I'm blind and I have
> only used the GUI a few times. I'm trying to learn how to use it with
> the new-ish screen reader for gnome, orca. But I have a long way to
> go.

I can only assume that Orca has improved quite a bit since the last
time I checked it out.  I was looking into screen-readers some time
ago, and Orca used to crash quite a lot; the screen reading extensions
for GNU Emacs are (from what I have been told) quite a lot better and
I knew one person that used that exclusively (I guess Emacs really is
an operating system!).  Good luck on Orca.  :)

	--- Mike
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