Adding back Skyrocket screen saver to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
Fri, 12/11/2009 - 11:52 — mdlueck
Ubuntu 9.10 ships with far less screen savers installed by default. Notably my favorite was missing, Skyrocket. This may simply be corrected by adding the package "rss-glx" which is where that screen saver resides.
Adding back Skyrocket screen saver to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
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Yes, skyrocket is one of my favorites too. My only problem is that my screensavers stop after about 5 minutes of running.
Stopping screen saver
Greetings KarlinOz: Are you saying that the screen saver "freezes up" or possibly does the power settings put the display to sleep?
Stopping Screen saver
Hi Michael,
Actually no the screensaver just simply quits - as if a key has been pressed or the mouse moved. Actually I think I've almost tracked it to happening when the xscreensaver package is installed. Once I've verified that I'll do some more Googling - who knows maybe I'll end up back here :-0
Aaahhh...
Thanks for checking back, KarlInOz!
I have seen that sort of nonsense when I run Parallels / VirtualBox VM environments. At times it takes a reboot of the system to correct the behavior.
First check if the screen saver is getting disabled by something. I think both Parallels / VirtualBox are able to somehow uncheck the screen saver enabled box.
Second, I have noticed that after the set time the screen saver tries to activate... the screen dims, then pops back to 100% brightness. That means it is time for me to reboot my system.
Not a virtual machine
This is on real hardware so I don't have any virtual options. Yes, I had noticed when I was having the problem on Karmic the screen dimming behaviour then jumping back to full bright - the screensaver wants to do its job but something is stopping it. I'm just toying with perhaps uninstalling the gnome screensaver and trying the xscreensaver by itself to see what happens.
Incidentally, tonight the reason I found my way back here was that I did a clean install upgrade to Lucid and didn't have the skyrocket saver - googled and found this thread and a post I hadn't responded to. So I installed rss-glx, chose skyrockets, checked the preview = all good then settled back to enjoy my skyrockets again. Guess what - no skyrockets just a black screen! Oh no! The preview worked perfectly but the actual screensaver doesn't. I guess I'm missing some dependency - when I uninstalled xscreensaver I notice it took out a lot of other stuff and I probably took more out than I needed to too, oh well, more sleuthing to do now.
Linux is the Host OS...
In my case, Linux is the Host OS, not the guest. So the Host OS has both Parallels / VirtualBox installed, and the Host OS has the screen saver enabled.
If you do not use Virtual Machine software, then I guess something else is capable of messing with Screen Saver settings.
Yes, it sounds like you are describing the same nonsense that I am seeing. Annoying at the very least!
No x?
And you don't have xscreensaver installed as well as gnome?
I have...
I have:
$ dpkg -l|grep xscreensaver
ii xscreensaver-data 5.07-0ubuntu3 data files to be shared among screensaver fr
ii xscreensaver-gl 5.07-0ubuntu3 GL(Mesa) screen hacks for xscreensaver
which came by default in 9.04, plus I use:
$ dpkg -l|grep rss
ii rss-glx 0.8.2-1ubuntu3 Really Slick Screensavers GLX Port
to get the Skyrocket screen saver which is the one I use.
Thought I had it...
I thought it was caused by having both xscreensaver and gnome screensaver and/or kscreensaver installed but I have uninstalled x and k leaving just gnome and rss-glx and still have the problem. The only thing I didn't do was a complete removal of xscreensver - I'm about to try that now. Another annoyance is that this behaviour seems to exhibit user by user - one user has the screensaver acting quite normally whereas another user has the problem.
Of course the worst part of all this is that once the screensaver quits it doesn't just time out then start up again, the countdown timer doesn't seem to be reset until an actual mouse or keyboard event is encountered. So although it is as if the system receives a keyboard or mouse event causing the screensaver to quit, it's not quite the case.
Well that's as far as I can go...
Well what I've found is that the screensaver stalling is caused by rss-glx package. Uninstall it and the screensaver behaviour returns to normal - it runs and doesn't stop. However even with it still installed if you log out and log in as a different user it will behave normally too so presumably it's something about the profile that's corrupted.
Here's what I did:
Uninstalled the rss-glx package,
tested the screensaver and it ran without hitch, not stopping.
Next I created a new user,
logged out then logged in as the new user,
installed rss-glx,
logged out then in as the user I had problems with - screensaver had the stopping problem again.
Then I logged out and in as another user on my system
and the screensaver works perfectly well.
So then I logged out and in as my problematic user and just simply uninstalled the rss-glx package.
I'll just have to say goodbye to skyrockets sadly.
Might be...
The screen saver "stalling" (aka screen dimming then popping back to 100% brightness) has never been so reproducible for me.
And once this week I cured it without rebooting! That was the first time for that!
I will open a bug report KarlInOz, please "me too" the bug, it is found here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/600603
...so I gave up.
OK, so in Lucid so far I haven't actually seen the screen dimming then popping back - that was an occaisional thing for me in Karmic. In Lucid it has been the screensaver would run for a time (maybe 10min or so) then quit = screen just returns to unscreensaved state and sceensaver wont activate again till I move the mouse or give a keystroke after which the screensaver activates after it's allotted time. This was also happening for me in Karmic.
I have given up on skyrocket. To get my user back to a normal screensaver state I uninstalled rss-glx but in the end even this didn't fix things for this particular user so finally, after a lot of experimentation, I deleted the user profile (and then had to spend some time setting it up as I had it previously set up = emails, firefox profile, desktop etc etc). I have left rss-glx uninstalled for fear that the bad behaviour may return, I have got all the xscreensaver packages re-installed however I haven't been game to re-install the kscreensaver packages.