2010-03-18, 16:27
I've had this issue for some time: xscreensaver and gnome-screensaver were sometimes launching at inappropriate times when running XBMC et al, and the disabling of the system screensavers would put the TV at risk of burning-in while XBMC and Boxee were not running.
This fix will help those of us who use a window manager such as Gnome, Fluxbox, or my favorite, E17. I personally run quite a few different programs on my HTPC including XBMC, Boxee (as a fallback for XBMC), SDLMame and a few other emulators, Firefox, and HuluDesktop. The problem is that switching between them leaves the screensaver disabled until a program with it's own screensaver is launched, or if XBMC or the like crashes to desktop, the screen will stay on, as has happened to me numerous times while falling asleep on the couch only to wake up hours later with the screen displaying a static image after XBMC had crashed.
So what can we do?
sudo apt-get install caffeine, add caffeine to the list of startup apps, run caffeine via Alt-F2 and add xbmc.bin to the list of apps, and you're done.
Caffeine is a handy little program which disables the screensaver temporarily, but what we really want it for is it's ability to disable the screensaver while certain processes are running. You could run gnome-power-manager, but not all programs can inhibit screensavers. Plus, I like xscreensaver.
I figure a small number of non-XBMC Live users might be able to benefit from this, since it saved me a lot of hassle, and it let me get rid of a custom daemon I had written which never really worked right.
I'm currently working on slimming down caffeine so that it is less of a RAM hog, but 13M isn't too bad. I didn't major in CS so I'm not terribly confident I can do any good.
This fix will help those of us who use a window manager such as Gnome, Fluxbox, or my favorite, E17. I personally run quite a few different programs on my HTPC including XBMC, Boxee (as a fallback for XBMC), SDLMame and a few other emulators, Firefox, and HuluDesktop. The problem is that switching between them leaves the screensaver disabled until a program with it's own screensaver is launched, or if XBMC or the like crashes to desktop, the screen will stay on, as has happened to me numerous times while falling asleep on the couch only to wake up hours later with the screen displaying a static image after XBMC had crashed.
So what can we do?
sudo apt-get install caffeine, add caffeine to the list of startup apps, run caffeine via Alt-F2 and add xbmc.bin to the list of apps, and you're done.
Caffeine is a handy little program which disables the screensaver temporarily, but what we really want it for is it's ability to disable the screensaver while certain processes are running. You could run gnome-power-manager, but not all programs can inhibit screensavers. Plus, I like xscreensaver.
I figure a small number of non-XBMC Live users might be able to benefit from this, since it saved me a lot of hassle, and it let me get rid of a custom daemon I had written which never really worked right.
I'm currently working on slimming down caffeine so that it is less of a RAM hog, but 13M isn't too bad. I didn't major in CS so I'm not terribly confident I can do any good.
Code:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2086 xbmc 21 1 311m 26m 13m S 2 1.8 0:13.44 caffeine
