[mythtv-users] myth & screen saver/screen power management

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/04/2010 05:40 PM, Kevin Ross wrote:
>> If you start mythfrontend before the screensaver is fully started
>> (something I would imagine is easy to do in a "Please wait while I load
>> everything and the kitchen sink" desktop environment like GNOME),
>> MythTV
>> will find that no screensaver is running when it starts and will not
>> attempt to manage the screensaver.  You may just need to put a sleep
>> into your mythfrontend start script.
>>     
> I looked into the relevant part of screensaver-x11.cpp:
>   
...
>   m_gscreensaverRunning =
>           myth_system("gnome-screensaver-command --help >&- 2>&-") == 0;
>   
...
> I tried running "gnome-screensaver-command --help" both with and without
> "gnome-screensaver" running, and it returns 0 in both cases.  So I don't
> think gnome-screensaver needs to be running first, just installed.
>   

Is there a better command to use to determine whether it's running or
not?  What about --version or something?

We really shouldn't be running gnome-screensaver-command --poke every 30
seconds during playback if gnome-screensaver-command isn't running.  As
a matter of fact, a lot of users with gnome-screensaver installed were
reporting issues with playback, and if the poke takes a long time when
the screensaver isn't running, I could see that causing some issues.

Any chance you could do a test for me and run:

time gnome-screensaver-command --version && echo $?

and

time gnome-screensaver-command --poke && echo $?

both with and without gnome-screensaver running.

I'm also hoping to write a new screensaver handler using
xdg-screensaver, but it would be a very different structure from the
current, so it's not a quick fix, and it's not that high on my TODO list
(since I don't run screensavers--after all, 95% of our population seems
to think that a desktop background is a screensaver, so how popular
could real screensavers be, anymore :).

Thanks,
Mike