Can I be picky about my screensavers in kde?
 

Was just wondering. In gnome, I could set the screensaver to random. And random selected only from those I ticked. KDE seems to use em all?

In KDE, as far as I know, the selection "Random" will pick a series of random screensavers from the entire inventory. (Each saver cycles once, then another one is chosen.) If your question is "Can I define the set of savers that are used in the pool for the "Random" selection under KDE?" I believe the answer is No. However, given that your screen saver isn't going to come on unless you're not using your PC, I would think that this would be a pretty insignificant point. In my experience, if you do care about your saver in KDE, you should just review all the options, and pick the one you like best. (My vote: Kumppa, which is absolutely hypnotic, particularly if you happen to have certain vices.) -- J.W.

Pardon me for being personal, J.W., but I have to ask.....just what vices?

misophist - ha!!!! an excellent question. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage anyone to engage in any activities that could be considered vices by others, but, for those people who might have already decided that having some sort of vice isn't exactly so bad, and might actually make life a little bit more interesting (or at least permit one to have better stories to tell on Monday about the weekend) I would only say that Kumppa is really cool to watch. And that's all I'm going to say. -- J.W.

perhaps this is a nice idea to suggest to the KDE developers by e-mail... :rolleyes: ;)

Most authors leave their contact address in the about box, especially if it's free software licensed under the GPL. The open source movement is a community, and you are invited to join it, or give feedback how to improve the software ;)

(and if you're a programmer, you can grab the source, apply the improvement, and send a patch with your changes to the authors. This is what open source is all about :D)

I came back from a break one day after leaving a make install to do it's thing, and when I came back, the screen boxes of all different colors on it, and they were moving around erratically . Anyway, after MPlayer recently frazzled the onscreen graphics on exit, I thought 'uh-oh', not another server reboot plz.

Turns out it was greynetic screensaver, and I nearly dropped my sandwich for nothing! :) Hmm, think I'll send them on a message. Cheers folks!

If you want something practical that follows the principle of least astonishment, the banner screensaver is useful. My wife and I both use it to leave messages.

Unholy's original question is valid. Some screensavers are really CPU eaters, so in a random screensaver scenario, it would be advantageous to disqualify screensavers you know are going to slow down your machine (especially if you have the machine doing stuff in the background). Hopefully the ability to define a pool for random screensavers will be added to KDE soon!

I went to their site to add to their wishlist using the bug tracking tool, and as it turns out, someone has already (quite recently) requested this because GL doesn't run well for him. This is really the reason I want this feature so fingers crossed.

I agree it would be a nice feature, but in the meantime, why not just delete the ones you don't want to use?

I'm not sure but this could do the trick:
- open the kde menu editor.
- enable "view hidden items".
- A screensavers folder should popup somewhere in the tree.
- remove some of the screensavers there.

If I'm not mistaken, they won't be actually deleted, neither the menu shortcut. In fact, the KDE menu editor marks these files as "hidden", and you can unhide them too. Your local /home/../.kde/share settings simply overrule the /opt/kde/share/ folder configuration

When I followed Yapp's advice, all I found was the commant to start a screensaver, no choices. So I got curious and checked some more. The individual screensavers seem to be in /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver. I suppose you could move or rename them to get the result you want. Deleting them might break the installation, so be careful.

it was really worth reading this post , for me ofcourse :-)

misophist i have a diffrent question to you , jus eager or you can say curious what does your footnote means "Eviva la ecolterra"

i know its out of topic , but just couldnt help it...

thx anyway

Now that I'm behind my KDE desktop again, I've double checked what I said;
the "Screen Savers" folder can be found in the menu editor, under the System folder... but only if you select "Show hidden items" from the menubar. If you remove an item there, it will be hidden, and doesn't show up in the "Screen Saver Settings" panel either. :) so it seams to work pretty well, because you can re-add the screen saver at any time.