[TuxOnIce-devel] Gnome desktop screen's fade taking forever with ToI? Read this

[Kenneth Crudup]

This is all on an Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy") 64-bit box, but I suspect that
it'll apply to anyone who has the same problem I did where the screen-
saver fading out to black when you start to hibernate with ToI takes
nearly a *minute*, usually the 2nd time around.

Back when I was attempting to use ToI the first time, I'd run into a
couple of snags- (1) I'd hang on "Cleaning Up" on resume (which I solved
by switching my Firewire driver to the alternate kernel stack) and (2)
when the screensaver kicked in after you'd used the Gnome desktop to
initiate a hibernate or suspend-to-RAM it would fade very slowly, taking
a full *minute* before the hibernation process would kick in. I'd solved
that issue by switching to "xscreensaver" instead, but I missed having
the "dim screen on idle" that would happen when gnome-power-manager
would signal gnome-screensaver to do (via DBus).

I suspect that what was happening is that since the gnome-screensaver
is a seperate process, it was in the process of trying to fade the screen
long after Tux-On-Ice had taken control of the system and that's why
it was using 100% of the CPU, but that's only my guess.

I was about to go get the latest screensaver package and manually patch
it to disable fade-in/outs permanently, but since I've come to like
using package managers now (hey, it's nice to not have to keep up with
all the versions and dependencies!), I did a search for a PPA first.

Turns out that there's an alternate(?) repository for some of the gnome-
screensaver utils from Ted Gould; here's his PPA page:

  https://launchpad.net/~ted-gould/+archive

If you select the appropriate build/release and download his gnome-
screensaver packages (how you do that is up to you, but I've been
getting pretty comfortable with the Synaptics manager), you can take
advantage of a patch he's done, which disables fade-in/out on LTSP
machines. Move the file /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver to
/usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-orig, then put this in gnome-screensaver
instead:

----
#!/bin/bash
export LTSP_CLIENT=1
exec /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-orig
----

Problem solved. If the screensaver thinks it's on one of those LTSP
machines (Linux Terminal Server Project) it won't attempt to fade (and
I think the fact that there's no option other than having to patch
the source to get what *should* be a checkbox-able option speaks to
the efficably of the gnome-screensaver development team ... :-\ )

Anyway, now I have "dim on idle" and the "supported" screensaver in
place (which means fewer hassles when an upgrade is pushed; I only
have to recreate this shell wrapper again).

	-Kenny

-- 
Kenneth R. Crudup  Sr. SW Engineer, Scott County Consulting, Los Angeles
O: 3630 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #138, L.A., CA 90034-6809      (888) 454-8181