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gnome-screensaver not activated
Status:
RESOLVED: WONTFIX
Product:
Xfce-utils
Component:
General

Comments

Description Miek Gieben 2009-10-29 15:55:06 CET
I've configured the screensaver to start after 5 minutes. However this does not happen. In Gnome it works ok.

I'm suspecting that it might have the same cause of these bugreports:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538790

Which maybe be caused by this change in gnome-screensaver:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567919
Comment 1 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-29 21:47:12 CET
Is gnome-screensaver actually running?

I have no intention of adding private API to xfce4-session for getting idle time.  The X server provides this.  If gnome-screensaver can't figure out idle time on Xfce, then gnome-screensaver is buggy.
Comment 2 Steve Dodier-Lazaro editbugs 2009-10-29 22:23:57 CET
Your problem is caused by gnome-screensaver now requiring gnome-session to run to get it's idle time. There doesn't seem to be any reason for this change in gnome-screensaver (except, maybe, causing more trouble to non-GNOME users who want to use gnome-screensaver).
Comment 3 Miek Gieben 2009-10-30 08:31:50 CET
Thanks for the comments. This pretty much sucks as I like to run gnome-screensaver and not xscreensaver.
Comment 4 Yves-Alexis Perez editbugs 2009-10-30 09:13:09 CET
Yes, it definitely suck, but there's not much one can do, exept asking for GNOME people to revert the change and stay with the X idle counter.
Comment 5 Ali Abdallah editbugs 2009-10-30 09:33:37 CET
(In reply to comment #4)
> Yes, it definitely suck, but there's not much one can do, exept asking for
> GNOME people to revert the change and stay with the X idle counter.

D-Bus is a very important message system, but in many places (like the case of gnome-screen-saver), it is abused, causing lot of problems and hidden runtime dependencies.

Another trivial stuff was moved from gnome-screen-saver (and gpm also) to the gnome session is the ability of inhibiting automatic DPMS activation on idle (or automatic sleeps for gpm), so no way for a media player to prevent gnome screen saver from switching off the screen if gnome session isn't running, this definitely sucks, i think is time to have our own screen saver application.
Comment 6 Steve Dodier-Lazaro editbugs 2009-10-30 09:42:39 CET
What about a GTK+ front-end to Xscreensaver's unlock dialog? It's not gonna be easy but it will be possibly more secure than gnome-screensaver and kscreensaver. See http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html
Comment 7 Yves-Alexis Perez editbugs 2009-10-30 10:02:17 CET
(In reply to comment #6)
> What about a GTK+ front-end to Xscreensaver's unlock dialog? It's not gonna be
> easy but it will be possibly more secure than gnome-screensaver and
> kscreensaver. See http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html

Unless you're an X11 security expert, I don't think it's a good idea (exactly for the stuff explained in the above page)
Comment 8 Michael Rasmussen 2009-12-06 12:16:45 CET
Why not simple fork gnome-screensaver and in this fork revert to the old behavior?
Comment 9 Michael Rasmussen 2009-12-06 15:00:54 CET
(In reply to comment #8)
> Why not simple fork gnome-screensaver and in this fork revert to the old
> behavior?

By studying the source for gnome-screensaver it seems to be these 3 functions in gs-watcher-x11.c which would need a rewrite:
static void
on_presence_status_changed (DBusGProxy    *presence_proxy,
                            guint          status,
                            GSWatcher     *watcher)
static void
on_presence_status_text_changed (DBusGProxy    *presence_proxy,
                                 const char    *status_text,
                                 GSWatcher     *watcher)
static gboolean
connect_presence_watcher (GSWatcher *watcher)

Eg. rewrite connect_presence_wather to optain idle signal from another source than gnome-session and adjust the two callbacks to reflect this change.
Comment 10 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2009-12-06 20:54:10 CET
This is getting a bit out of scope for this bug.  If you want to complain about gnome-screensaver's deficiencies, you'll need to file a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org.  Nothing is going to get solved here.
Comment 11 Olivier Mehani 2011-05-18 01:44:55 CEST
Hi,

As mentionned in the Gnome Bugzilla [0] (and other related bugs), I've had the same problem with my simple Fvwm-based environment and ended up writing a Python script which impersonates  the Gnome SessionManager, and does the XIDLE detection for Gnome ScreenSaver. It's available from [1], and the code is documented at [2].

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592093
[1] https://scm.narf.ssji.net/svn/shtrom/browser/default-env/bin/SessionManager.py
[2] http://www.narf.ssji.net/~shtrom/wiki/projets/gnomescreensavernosession

Bug #5927

Reported by:
Miek Gieben
Reported on: 2009-10-29
Last modified on: 2011-05-18

People

Assignee:
Xfce Bug Triage
CC List:
6 users

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