ive recently just tested the waters of linux, and i decided to install KDE 3.5.2 on my Ubuntu 6.06 install.

not knowing much of anything with KDE (and linux for that matter) i am a bit baffled as to why the only screensaver that works is the 'blank screen'. all of the others ones do nothing.

any help would be appreciated.

cheers

The screensavers work fine for me in Suse, so I suspect its something to do with the KDE packages in Ubuntu. What happens when you try to use the sceensavers?

i set the delay to 1 minute for testing purposes. after the minute, nothing happens at all, the screen just freezes (i can tell because time doesn't change on the clock) and when i move the mouse it goes back to normal.

im guessing that i didn't install something important with KDE, what that may be, im not sure.

Screensavers work fine in (k)ubuntu.
Some of them are quite graphics-intensive, and may appear to "freeze" if you do not have the drivers for your graphics card. These are not installed by default.

What is your graphics card? lspci -v in a terminal window will tell you.
Is it an NVIDIA card? (You are in luck!!)
Is it an ATI card? (You may be in luck)
Something else => Go shopping for an NVIDIA card

The NVIDIA drivers are easy to install for (k)ubuntu - so easy that I was almost disappointed that I didn't have to download my kernel source and do the whole compile & configure thing.

HTH

There was a bug in one of the KDE 3.5.2 packages that made it so the screensaver wouldn't start. They will test just fine but for some reason the timeout preferences just refuses to work.

If you can update to 3.5.3 the bug was fixed. Or just use the xscreensaver for now.

well, i have an ATI Radeon 9600 mobile, but here's the lspci -v
i recall installing my ATI drivers awhile back, but then again, i have no idea how to check if it was done correctly.

okay, 2 questions 1) how do i update KDE to 3.5.3? 2) what is xscreensaver?

Take a look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf
See which driver is specified in the "Device" section.

I've had good luck adding the following:
to your kdesktoprc file in "/home/user/.kde/share/config" under the "[ScreenSaver]" section, assuming you're running KDE. On two of my machines running Kubuntu, the screensavers failed. After adding the above code and restarting, they started working again.

I've also had success in fixing broken 3.5.3 KDE screensavers in Kubuntu Dapper using these instructions.