Hey guys,

Im running RH9 and KDE 3.1.

I've recently noticed that I cannot lock my screen. I cannot lock it from the K menu, nor can I lock it from right clicking on the desktop and selecting "Lock Screen". When I select either of these two options, nothing happens.

I've been able to lock the screen before, like 2 weeks ago. Since then I've only made 1 small package update from the redhat network.

What gives? Am I overlooking something totally obvious?

the first thing i will have to ask is, are you running as root? like in other words, are you logged into your desktop environment as a root user? i am pretty sure you can't lock the screen when logged in as root so this is the first thing that comes to my mind..

nope, I am not logged in as root. I am logged in as a normal user. Just for kicks, i tried becoming root with the su - command, then trying to lock. No dice there either.

Other related info: I tried closing all running apps, still no luck

In order for the Lock screen to work properly, you must have a screensaver enabled in the Control Center, so go check that out....

Yup, I've got a screen saver enabled.

Ok, i arbitrarily logged out and logged back in, and now I can lock the screen fine. Not quite sure how logging out helped the situation....

If you use MPlayer for viewing movies, it has an option that says "Disable XScreensaver during playback." Apparently, it doesn't re-enable screen savers after playback finishes. Could that, or a similar application, have been your problem?

that would be my guess too. i noticed this with xine. xine will automatically disable the screensaver but reenable it. the problem i noticed is if i shutdown xine while a movie/dvd was still running. apparently the kde screensaver won't be reenabled. i don't know if this is strictly a kde issue or a dvd player issue. since then i've just been using xscreensaver to handle the lock screen duties in kde. you can get kde screensavers working with xscreensaver and vice versa (new versions of kde are supposed automatically list xscreensaver hacks while getting kde screensavers working with xscreensaver requires you to edit your users ~/.xscreensaver file).

As a root user when I try to run screensaver it gives a warning message.

The XScreenSaver daemon doesn't seem to be running on display 0.0 Launch it now?

I pressed OK.

Another error screen apprears which says that run xhost +localhost command etc.....

After all this still the lock screen is not working in the root login?