Screensavers in Ubuntu 9.x

Saturday, 13 March 2010

I used to do some incredible tweaking for my screensaver in Ubuntu, especially because gnome-screensaver wouldn’t allow for editing the particular screensaver options like xscreensaver would (see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreenSaver). These days, I don’t want to tweak… I just want the thing to shut off when I am watching fullscreen flash video, so that I don’t have to wiggle the mouse every ten minutes. 🙂

So I made a simple toggle script and created a launcher for the script on the desktop. Gonna watch video? Double-click the icon. Done watching video, double-click the icon.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
PID=`pidof gnome-screensaver`

if [ "$PID" != "" ]; then
  #gnome-screensaver is running shut it down
  killall -9 gnome-screensaver
else
  #gnome-screensaver is not running, start it up
  gnome-screensaver
fi