Ed Mack wrote:

...

...

...

Simple, clean, avoids flamewars.

That's a nice way to handle it, but it's only really aimed at the geek population. 'Bootstrapping GCC' isn't something many normal users do.

I like the idea of including a few 'pretty' screensavers the user can choose to run from the control panel if they feel the urge to customise

• otherwise people can become disalusioned, and people will happily

judge their first Linux experience by the quality of given screensavers. A lot of the Xscreensavers need to be taken to the pasture and shot, they are /so/ 1983

I agree that a few simple/quality screensavers would be fine to include by default, but if the debate over which should stay will at all delay the removal of all the cruft, I'd say we go to blank-only.

I think blank-only is a better default for now, and we can work on getting a couple (probably just one good simple Fedora logo screensaver) back in later on.

Steven Garrity

On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 05:57, Tom Weeks wrote:

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 09:52 am, Steven Garrity wrote:

...

I agree that a few simple/quality screensavers would be fine to include by default, but if the debate over which should stay will at all delay the removal of all the cruft, I'd say we go to blank-only.

Why not do a default screen savor that provides information such as clickable links to the Fedora Core mail lists, on line RH-EL3 manuals or Fedora Docs, useful info for newbies and geeks alike.

That kind of subverts the idea of a screensaver that kicks in automatically after a period of inactivity and vanished as soon as the user does something, e.g. move the mouse ;-).

I thunk the info you mention would be more suited to be put into the default home page (file:///usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html). Feel free to put an RFE into bugzilla.

Nils

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 17:38:11 +0100, Mike Hearn mike@navi.cx wrote:

However, a screensaver that gave random tips, fortune cookies, helpful advice, alerted you if there were pending security updates etc *would* be very cool :)

Not as a default. I cringe at the thought of computers that by default broadcast a message like "Hey moron! You need to totally update me with security updates" while sitting.. idling...with the operator away from the display..just waiting for someone to walk by and to note that the computer the display is attached to is in a vulnerable state. Information leakage isn't really a good idea. I don't even want to see the Operating system version being display if at all possible, certainly not uptime or kernel version or whether the machine is security patched in a screensaver.

-jef

True, bootstrapping GCC is not a typical user activity. However, paying electricity bills is pretty common. Given that many people now have a couple computers at home, the money saved by not driving the monitors 24/7 would be attractive.

The way I run my computers is about 10 mins of screen-savers (Just for view, and also to remind me to get back to it :)) and then power saving blank. Does me great.

For some nice screensavers, I say get the (assuming liscencing is ok) 'Really Slick X Screensavers' pack. It's very MacOSX-ish and pleasent to watch (All openGL).

http://rss-glx.sourceforge.net/

For simplistic, keep the simple text one, and XRaySwarm and AntSpotlight. They are pretty and Screen-saverish (not just hackish :)

Ed

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 15:03 -0400, Chris Farber wrote:

Trimming down the screensavers is only the start, other work needs to be done like better screensavers. The biggest issue for me, is that I can be watching a DVD in my fedora installation and then the screensaver kicks in! The only way to stop it is to disable my screensaver, and re-enable it when i'm done.

Try a better DVD player. :-) Totem automagically tells xscreensaver not to blank when it's playing in fullscreen.

- jck

Chris Farber (ephex@earthlink.net) said:

Trimming down the screensavers is only the start, other work needs to be done like better screensavers. The biggest issue for me, is that I can be watching a DVD in my fedora installation and then the screensaver kicks in! The only way to stop it is to disable my screensaver, and re-enable it when i'm done. For a user, that would be unnacceptable, and is certaintly annoying me to the point I just reboot if I'm going to watch a movie or tv show.

Your DVD player is broken, it should do that for you. ;)

Bill

Trim down the scre <trim big stupid rant> er all Linux is

Have you looked at the majority of X screen savers with FC2? They are called 'hacks' by the program for a reason - most of them are cheap and ugly. Most look much more dated than Windows 95. It's trimming them that makes it more up to date and clean.

The wallpapers are great, btw.

Ed

Mike A. Harris wrote:

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, psychoelmo wrote:

...

this makes sense to me.. although i would leave a couple of basic ones in core, and split up the rest into two packages, ones that run without 3d accel. and those that need it.

All of the OpenGL screensavers work with Mesa software OpenGL, albeit some of them are quite slow, but none of them have a hard requirement of 3D acceleration.

That's like listening to a CD that skips, or a download that goes at two bytes per second.

It does make sense to me for them to be in a xscreensaver-3D-savers package or something perhaps.

Yes, it does.

Bill Nottingham (notting@redhat.com) said:

Mike A. Harris (mharris@www.linux.org.uk) said:

...

All of the OpenGL screensavers work with Mesa software OpenGL, albeit some of them are quite slow, but none of them have a hard requirement of 3D acceleration.

Well, gflux is rather... unpleasant to run on a SW-GL only box. But it's not in the default config.

Erm, glblur. :)

Bill

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 21:27 -0300, Steven Garrity wrote:

So, as this thread illustrates, there are plenty of opinions on the screensavers.

Perhaps someone with the authority/ability can make a call on this based on the various options floated on this thread and go ahead with it.

So what I'm going to end up doing is making the base xscreensaver package have a small number of screensavers, and then have an additional package for the more fancy ones.

--Ray Strode

I like this idea. I'm not sure if a screensaver like this exists - but how about including a slideshow screensaver, one that cycles through images in a directory with some nice transitional effects [don't ask me to program this though hehe]. Since this probably won't eat much cpu at all, it would make a very nice choice for the screensavers-base package.

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 22:20, Mike Fedyk wrote:

Ray Strode wrote:

...

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 21:27 -0300, Steven Garrity wrote:

...

So, as this thread illustrates, there are plenty of opinions on the screensavers.

Perhaps someone with the authority/ability can make a call on this based on the various options floated on this thread and go ahead with it.

So what I'm going to end up doing is making the base xscreensaver package have a small number of screensavers, and then have an additional package for the more fancy ones.

How about a four way split (feel free to come up with better names)?

screensavers-base screensavers-3d screensavers-pretty (all judged to be better than the ones in misc) screensavers-misc (all of the ones you'd love to leave out completely)

Now let's nominate some screensavers that are not resource intensive (ie, not 3d and don't take up more than say 25% CPU on a computer 3-4 years old) and pleasing to the eye to make a list totaling 10 or less. I can think of some now, but can't think of their name right now.

So, what say you?

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 11:25:19PM -0400, Chris Farber wrote:

I like this idea. I'm not sure if a screensaver like this exists - but how about including a slideshow screensaver, one that cycles through images in a directory with some nice transitional effects [don't ask me to program this though hehe]. Since this probably won't eat much cpu at all, it would make a very nice choice for the screensavers-base package.

There are many screensavers now that do that stuff. It's a xscreensaver option, to pick images from a directory, the desktop, or video frames.

Fedora default could be changed from the desktop to random images from a directory.

Regards, Luciano Rocha

I've been trying to hack up a basic logo display/slideshow screensaver, but it's quite difficult. Would anybody with experience using xscreensaver/screenhack.h/xlib be willing to help or take over? What I've got so far is here: http://www.linuxgrrl.com/ss/ - a modification to grenetic.

Here are my nominations for each category, for what it's worth:

How about a four way split (feel free to come up with better names)?

screensavers-base

1. Popsquares 2. Attraction Splines 3. Halo 4. Halftone 5. Phosphor 6. Font Glide 7. Font Glide Scroller 8. Slide screen

screensavers-3d

1. Atlantis 2. Bouncing Cow 3. Circuit 4. Endgame 5. Flying Toasters 6. Lavalite 7. queens 8. Atunnel 9. GL snake 10. GL Blur

screensavers-pretty (all judged to be better than the ones in misc)

1. metaballs 2. polytopes 3. shadebobs 4. glmatrix 5. xmatrix 6. stairs 7. Flurry 8. eruption

Also came up with two other categories looking through them:

Desktop Distortions: 1. decay screen 2. ripples (desktop) 3. rot zoomer 4. rot zoomer sweep 5. slide screen 6. spotlight 7. twang 8. zoom fatbits 9. Distort

Text: 1. phosphor 2. star wars 3. GL text 4. Font Glide 5. Font Glide Scroller

screensavers-misc (all of the ones you'd love to leave out completely)

Now let's nominate some screensavers that are not resource intensive (ie, not 3d and don't take up more than say 25% CPU on a computer 3-4 years old) and pleasing to the eye to make a list totaling 10 or less. I can think of some now, but can't think of their name right now.

So, what say you?

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Matthew Miller wrote:

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 12:01:29AM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:

...

...

screensavers-3d

1. Atlantis
2. Bouncing Cow
3. Circuit
4. Endgame
5. Flying Toasters
6. Lavalite
7. queens
8. Atunnel
9. GL snake
10. GL Blur

Plus, add in the super-cool rss_glx screensavers -- having it as a completely separate package introduces a nasty kludge....

We're trying to cut down on screensavers, not increase them. ;o)

Seriously though, Fedora Extras is the best place for something like rss. Of course only after any legal issues that might exist in the code can be investigated and resolved/concluded. Last I checked there was some potential problems, and even low risks are risks not worth taking for something as trivial as screensavers. ;)

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 12:10:11PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:

The current rss package does a sick thing with sed and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XScreenSaver in its rpm postinstall scripts. Is there a way to avoid that other than including them in the base package?

*notices rest of thread*

(Nevermindme.)

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, [ISO-8859-1] M�ir�n Duffy wrote:

Desktop Distortions:

It looks quite reasonable to me to package these separately and do not include them by default. They break the rule "lock and no one will see what's on your desktop while you get your coffee".

behdad

1. decay screen
2. ripples (desktop)
3. rot zoomer
4. rot zoomer sweep
5. slide screen
6. spotlight
7. twang
8. zoom fatbits
9. Distort

--behdad

Nils Breunese wrote:

Mike Fedyk wrote:

...

How about a four way split (feel free to come up with better names)?

screensavers-base screensavers-3d screensavers-pretty (all judged to be better than the ones in misc) screensavers-misc (all of the ones you'd love to leave out completely)

Wouldn't it be better to create a separate OpenGL screensavers package?

Yes.

Or is that the -3d package?

Yes

I have a dual-head setup, one nvidia geforce4mx and an old sis pci card. I like to run flurry, but it needs OpenGL and unfortunately that sis card doesn't support it. So if my system starts the screensaver one monitor has the pretty flurry visuals and the other one prints out some errors. Having different screensavers on each screen would probably involve changing xscreensaver?

Dunno.

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 02:33, Ray Strode wrote:

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 21:27 -0300, Steven Garrity wrote:

...

So, as this thread illustrates, there are plenty of opinions on the screensavers.

Perhaps someone with the authority/ability can make a call on this based on the various options floated on this thread and go ahead with it.

So what I'm going to end up doing is making the base xscreensaver package have a small number of screensavers, and then have an additional package for the more fancy ones.

Have you already decided how to tackle the "how can xscreensaver hacks packages be dropped in simply" problem I outlined in one of my last posts?

I've already messed around with adding hacks to /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/XScreensaver (in the course of packaging rss-glx for Fedora) and this is neither fun and nor reliable ;-) -- you need to deal with any of {xscreensaver base package,random xscreensaver extra hacks package} being {installed,removed,updated}. I'd vote very much for some /etc/xscreensaver/hacks.d directory where extra hacks pacvkages can simply drop their configuration.

Nils

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 09:47 +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:

Have you already decided how to tackle the "how can xscreensaver hacks packages be dropped in simply" problem I outlined in one of my last posts?

No. I haven't looked at the technical issues involved at all yet. Your proposal may be the best way to go. I'll revisit the issue when I've set aside time to make the required changes.

--Ray

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 12:25, Harald Hoyer wrote:

I can't believe screensavers are this popular to Linux users... What a long thread :-) for *just* screensavers... We must have a really stable distribution :) or are they just distraction from all the bugs? :)

Seriously many of my friends, both from computer illiterate and Windows-camps simply drool over some of the screensavers Linux has. Does that have *anything* to do with reality of usability? No. But cool screensavers sure as hell makes people think "wow, linux has that kind of stuff as *screensavers*, wonder what else can it do my windows box doesn't" :)

- Panu -