Transparent Screen Saver for Linux
 

This is a request to any competent developers that have the desire to create a hugely useful tool for a lot of people.

Windows has it, so should Linux: A Transparent Screensaver.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but it's a truly useful concept. An example would be a NOC environment where there is a need to display content on overhead screens. To display the content, they have to be logged in to have access to certain resources such as web browsers, or client applications to display the data.

It is insecure to leave these machines logged in, even in a controlled environment. What is needed is a transparent screensaver that can lock the terminal to prevent unauthorized use, but still display the entire screen. The screensaver would display a dialog box to enter the user credentials upon mouse movement or keyboard activity. If no credentials were presented, the dialog would disappear.

I've searched high and low for something like this with no luck. I would be very appreciative if someone could point out something that does this or if someone with some programming skills could tackle this problem and make it available to the community.

Thanks in advance,

Any chance the Xscreensaver package is installed?

If so, the decayscreen one, set with a gigantic delay like so or bigger even, appears to do what you want if you set the Advanced-->Grab_Desktop_Images checkbox. Kinda hacky, but until you find a real version ;) maybe it will work for you. There are others that will probably work the same way.


decayscreen -root -delay 1000000000000 is the command-line of the screensaver itself, and `$xscreensaver-command -lock` will lock the desktop and put up a frozen+locked image of the desktop.

Sasha

Thanks!

That's close, but no cigar... It appears that the image of the desktop is static... The screen needs to be current to be useful... i.e. I need it to display MRTG stats, or system alerts that indicate incidents that need to be handled.

xtrlock(1) is a command that does this exactly. It locks your mouse and keyboard after being invoked and will not unlock unless the user types in their password followed by enter.

The only annoying thing about it is that it turns the cursor into a blue padlock, but that's a small price to pay because this is the only tool I found for this job (this is something I myself wanted to do a while ago). I think that xtrlock will be in the repositories of most distros.

Thanks! I will check it out!