I'm running mandrake 10.1 Community and I cannot get any of the screensavers to start automatically. The display gets blanked and locked, but nothing is displayed on the screen.

In the KDE Control centre i can choose the screensaver, and preview it, and see it's tiny preview in the control centre, and even configure it, but no matter what I try i still cannot get the things to run.

Any ideas??

Yeah this is a permissions issue not yet fixed in 10.1 CE (likely to be fixed in the Official release).

Try running xscreensaver-demo or xscreensaver-command as root for information on what the screensavers require.

Read the warning messages it will pop up.

check this out --->http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#root-fail

instead of Xscreensaver
u can use Xlockmore --->http://www.tux.org/~bagleyd/xlockmore.html

The messages given by xscreensaver-demo and xscreensaver-command when run as root weren't helpful. Running them as a non-root user gave the same error messages, that the xscreensaver daemon wasn't running and did i wish it to be started. Saying yes to that still made no difference, neither did giving root access to my non-root user display.

I'm totally lost now. Perhaps a regression to 10.0 Official is in order....

I am using xscreensaver on my system under Mandrakelinux 10.1 (Community) with no troubles at all. If you want the xscreensaver software to start at every boot, create a text file named start-xscreensaver.sh containing the following command:

xscreensaver -nosplash

put the file in ~/.kde/Autostart

This presumes you are using the KDE desktop. This command starts xscreensaver with no splash screen. If you want to see the splash screen at system start, do not include the -nosplash part.

HTH,

This should have taken you to information about fixing the permissions so that what the prior posted mentioned would NOT have been required.

Did you see the references to this in the error messages?

Usually it's pretty obvious about this.

opjose There were *NO* other error messages.

ernie The xscreensaver daemon is already running as I started it manually when given the option after running screensaver-command

Sod it. Something is rotten in my system so I'll be reformatting this PC later this afternoon

Weird.

Usually in the text console from which you launched xscreensaver-demo, you'll see it complaining about the permissions and it gives you several suggestions on how to fix this.

After downloading the 10.1 Official CD's and 1 reinstall later the problem still existed. After a bit of messing about, and making the script to start the xscreensaver daemon when I login, I eventually got it working. I found that I had to uncheck the boxes in the KDE screensaver control panel otherwise nowt happened.

I also created two new application links for my desktop, one pointing at xscreensaver-demo to let me choose which screensaver(s) to run, and theit timeout options. The other link pointed to a little script that waited 5 seconds and then ran "xscreensaver-command -lock" to start the screensaver immediately and have it lock the desktop.

It's just a pity that xscreensaver isn't better integrated with KDE as it was in the past.

Thanks to opjose and ernie for their help

I tried out xscreensaver briefly--no great problems getting it to run--but was disturbed at how hot it made the CPU run with all the graphics/computation intensive work it was doing. So though some of the screensavers were VERY pretty and I really liked seeing them, I went back to xlockmore, which runs cool even if it's not as cool to look at!

Most but not all of the xscreensavers are now part of the KDE distribution and should show up in the KDE control panel.

Except for Atlantis (which runs poorly for some reason) all of these barely increase CPU utilization on my GoFX5700 equipped laptop.

How little CPU utilization they use seems to depend upon how much work can be offloaded to the GPU.

I never thought of that. I have a pretty primitive graphics setup, ATI Rage 128 and that's about it. Probably more sophisticated graphics hardware would incrase efficiency a lot.

They show up ok, the mini-previews go ok, the settings are changeable, but it just don't start by itself, nor do they start when the preview button is clicked. This might be more of a Mandrake cock-up though...

You might check to see if the screensaver service is set to start at boot, and is running, by using the Mandrake Control Panel. Click on "start" if it shows it in the list and shows it "stopped." Then try your menus again.

jonr, that could be quite difficult, as there is no screensaver service. Neither is there a control script in /etc/rc.d/init.d/