Gnome screensaver

Question

Hi,

After many years of Windows development in C/C++ i've decided to make a move to linux, and see if i can put together a simple screen saver.

The code is an SDL based OpenGL particle engine affair, nothing too complex. I've got the code running ok as a stand-alone app, but i have been having some trouble finding out how to build a screen saver app.

I'm running ubuntu 10.04 if that makes much difference, but i was wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of a decent tutorial on building basic gnome screen savers.

Thanks

Answer 1

Which source?

I agree with @Andrew McGregor, find the source. The question is: which source?

gnome-screensaver?

Jamie Zawinski (the author of xscreensaver) writes "I don't support gnome-screensaver, and I encourage you to run xscreensaver instead." I agree with jwz, since among gnome-screensaver's other faults, it does not support per-screensaver settings. Its authors have taken a set of xscreensavers and included them with default settings. But many (if not all) of them support tweaking these settings quite much in xscreensaver.

xscreensaver!

Anyway, here is the xscreensaver source. My advice is that you get it running without any changes, then you pick one of the OpenGL savers and copy it. This way you will have a working screensaver from start. Then you can start to change it towards your code. That's how I did, anyway.