leŭksman

I’ve been using Synergy to share my mouse & keyboard between my Linux desktop and Mac laptop in the office.

One of the features of Synergy that hasn’t been working so well for me is the screen-saver synchronization. I’m not too picky, but I do want to be able to quickly lock both screens at once so I can leave the room without leaving a bunch of server terminals open to anyone who walks in!

After a little research, I found that Synergy’s X11 server code looks explicitly for Xscreensaver, but Ubuntu ships with gnome-screensaver, which has a different interprocess control API based on DBUS. This is apparently an issue of much contention, as a lot of video players and other apps haven’t updated to speak the new protocol, and you end up with screen savers activating during long-playing files and such.

One possibility is to manually reconfigure Ubuntu to use Xscreensaver, but it would probably be cuter to add support for the DBUS interface to Synergy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 10:37 am and is filed under devel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.