Wow...

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Ok I admit it I'm lame when it comes to Unix but where and what is the line break in this command to make the screensaver desktop.
What am I supposed to remove?

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After "Resources/" and before "ScreenSaverEngine....". Just type the whole thing as one line, no breaks or spaces of any sort other than what's shown.

-rob.

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I don't think this necessarily requires Quartz Extreme video card. Still a bit confused myself about QE - but I have run the test apps that are floating around and they indicate QE is not available on my G4/400 (AGP) with stock ATI Rage video card. Yet I can use this tip and run screensavers on my desktop. FANTASTIC!!! FYI - some screensavers are better than other for example - Flurry runs fine, but it draws weird boxes around the screensavers and where drop shadows WOULD be behind Finder Windows (I have drop shadows turned off with TinkerTool). Euphoria runs great with no artifacts whatsoever. Euphoria runs at about 15% CPU. I know I can renice the process and it lowers the but is it possible to start the process from the very beginning at a specific nice level?

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Use the 'nice' command to run a program with an initial nice level, as found with 'apropos nice'.

This works on my 500Mhz dual-USB iBook, but it's definitely too slow to leave running. I hope Apple sticks a G4 into this form factor sometime RSN. :/

--M


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Don't know what use this is, but it is cool and works on my Beige G3 (w/ PCI Radeon card) quite well despite the lack of QE support (since my card isn't AGP). A quick check of top shows it takes between 0.7 and 1.1% of the CPU...





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What? How come it only uses .7-1.1% for you? I tried it and it was using a solid 20% of my 800 meg G3 iBook. How intrusive is your screen saver? Maybe it had something to do with the fact I was using a saver called cubes that makes great use of QE.

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running, I tried this with iTunes.saver thinking it would be cool to run G-Force in the background... the iTunes saver took control of the screen and kept looping back into itself, even after force quitting the process. Quitting iTunes fixed it, and I'm not going to try to find out if it'll work w/out iTunes running :)

Every other saver I've checked works superbly on my dual 533 G4 896mb, Rage 6 w/32mb. Helios.saver is using 40% of the cpu with surface rendering... but looks really sweet.

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The Marine Acquarium screen saver from Serene Screen at http://www.serenescreen.com/ looks fantastic. It's a huge speed hog, though. Looks like most of the processor is used by the Window Manager when the screen saver is running, rather than by the screen saver itself.

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Agreed - the Aquarium looks absolutely great (if a little distracting...).

It's using about 25% of my CPU (Dual 1GHz QuickSilver, GeForce 4 Titanium, 2 x Apple 17" LCD), although it's not quite as smooth as when it's just running as a screensaver...

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By not quite as smooth what FPS do you mean?

I've tried running Marine Aquarium in on a Quicksilver Dual 1 GHz, GeForce 4 Titanium, 1.5 GB, 3 screen (2x 21" and 1x 17" LCD) and get appallingly low FPS (~4 fps) when using it as a background. I've tried having it run on just one monitor with most of the fish off but it still chokes.

However, normal screen saver mode works fine (25-30 FPS) with the aquarium displaying on all three monitors with the maximum number of fish.

- Roland Combes

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aaaahhhhaaaaa!!!!!!!! HAA!haa!!!!!!

soo much fun!!! it works quite well...!!!!!!... (G4 400AGP w/Rage128pro 16mb)....
of course any GL-saver taps my CPU.... but I've got the Technichron screen saver showing me a world map and where the sun is on my PD... :) so much fun ....

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how do i quit the screensaver?

all control -c does is a new line break

help anyone?

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If you remove the ampersand sign on the end of the line, ctrl+C (or cmd+.) will quit it.

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With option "-module <moduleName>" you could setup your background screensaver :-)
Now, it could be different of your default screensaver.


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Where are you guys getting the options for the ScreenSaverEngine? Tried "usage" "help", etc....nothing....


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strings ScreenSaverEngine | grep "^-"

This should work for the "real" binary of any app which takes command line options. That is, the one inside /AppName.app/Contents/MacOS. The basic idea is that the options are expressed somewhere in the code as literal strings, and since the flags all start with a hyphen, that grep should filter them out.

---

jon

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Now try the -foreground switch!

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Any ideas of how to use this trick for animating the background/foreground of the login screen?

Coolest would be if it started automatically...

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There is a -loginWindow switch for the ScreenSaverEngine program, which I don't know what it does...

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Now it would really be amazing if we could run the screen saver on the desktop and sync it to iTunes audio or run the iTunes visuals on the desktop!

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http://www.subsume.com/static/WebObjects/SubsumeSite/SubsumeSite/Tech/Software/iTunes.html

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Soundstream uses the microphone on your mac to render a visulizations. It will respond to music, or anything else that your mic can hear.

http://www.pcheese.net/software/soundstream/

now to update my soundstream...

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did any of you guys check whether your mac accepts CDs after you run the background screensaver.... mine just chucks them back out... when I stop the screensaver background everything is back to normal!

Am I doing something wrong, or am I the first one to notice this?

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My g4 867MHZ quicksilver experiences a similiar problem, the CDs wont eject if in the disk drive on the internal cd bay when running the screensaver in the background.

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Last login: Tue Aug 27 10:24:56 on ttyp1

Why doesn't this work for me? I open Terminal and paste <</System/Library/Frameworks/
ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &>> and hit RETURN.
I have a G4 867 running 10.2.
Here is my Terminal window:

Welcome to Darwin!
[G4:~] mcmillan% /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/: Permission denied.
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &[G4:~] mcmillan% ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
[1] 4717
[G4:~] mcmillan% ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine: Command not found.


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You didn't remove the line break.

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Very impressive on my 800 iMac flatpanel. Wow indeed!

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We offer a utility that allows you to do this without touching the Terminal. We just updated xBack for 10.2 last night. In short, xBack offers a nice screen saver browser, the ability to easily change the screen saver and start/stop the saver. You can also add xBack to your login items to have it automatically start your selected saver on login. More info at : <http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/xback.html>

David

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I, after unsuccessfully trying to change my login screen, have wondered if I could run the screensaver behind the user login panel...

Any hints on how to do this? I know I could add it to the startupitems or crontab, but don't know if it would kill itself upon login, or if it would even show up on the login screen

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I made a quick applescript:

do shell script "/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &"

Save the script as an Application. Works on my Pismo, but is a bit slow (Flurry)

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If you dont want the applescript to hang, try this instead:

do shell script "/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &> /dev/null &"

If saving as an application, make sure to check "run only" so the app will quit after
running and not freeze.

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If anybody would rather use a graphical tool to run screensavers in the Finder, a large number of GUI wrappers have been created. In my biased opinion (developer), Visage does the best job with the most features. Visage allows you to control the CPU usage of the effects, start effects at login, and have the effects rotated at a designated time interval from your collection of favorites. Here is a list of excellent apps & scripts people might want to try, all of which perform a similar function and can be downloaded from VersionTracker.com:
- Visage
- Background Screen Saver
- BackgroundSaver
- CoolBackground
- DeskEffects
- Desktop Effects
- FackBore
- WallSleep
- xBack

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Is is normal to have a 550s fan running constantly after you enable this. It is cool, but my fan is on constantly. COOLNESS ROCKS!!!!

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I did this just as instructed but when I tried to quit it using Control C it wouldn't stop. Only logging out and then back in put things back to normal. Nice trick, but I think until they find a program that does this I'll stick with a static desktop.

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good lord there are all kinds of GUI wrappers. I prefer Backlight (you can find it on Versiontracker.com). It runs from the menu, lets you configure the CPU usage, can easily try the different screen savers, and it's free.

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Control-C only kills processes that are in the foreground in the terminal. Since the command in this hint is run in the background (with the ampersand at the end of the command line) it will not be hit by control-C.

Instead, use kill. For example, run ps (or ps -awx) to find the process number of the desktop background screen saver, then kill that process. This can be made fancier: other hints/forum threads have talked about combining this with grepping for the name of the command you want to kill. Probably the best thing to do is to use the killall command. On the other hand, ps and kill are nice and simple. (Translation: I am too lazy to read man killall.)

Anyway, how you kill the thing is your own choice. I use simple commands to go with my simple mind. The real point is that the fact that control-c doesn't work does not signal an error in the hint; it just means you have to use kill instead of control-C.

zach

PS. There is some info about background jobs ("asynchronous processes") in the man page for tcsh (which is where you end up if you do man jobs, or man bg, etc.), but you have to scroll waaaaaay down to get to it.


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[code]
#!/usr/bin/sh
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ResourcesScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
[/code]

and

[code]
#!/usr/bin/sh
killall ScreenSaverEngine
[/code]

should work great

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It doesn't work for me. I type in the string and Terminal replies "'background' not understood" What am I missing$

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This trick is great except... it doesn't work for me now that I have upgraded to panther.. When I try to run it, the entire screen goes black and all I have is the mouse arrow. Any ideas how to make this code work for panther??

---
--SuPrA--

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Not sure how to fix it-- my machine does the same thing!

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Uncheck "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" in the Security preference pane, and your screen won't go black anymore in Panther.

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All that you have to do to get rid of this black screen, without turning off your password is to put the computer to sleep, thus allowing you to authenticate and get rid of the black screen. This is easy with a powerbook, just close the lid. I don't know about the ease or possibility of doing this on a desktop mac.

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see title

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You can use the

-module Random

to do exactly what you'd expect it to. That's case sensitive, by the way.

---

jon

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see title

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If you select a QC (Quartz Composer screen saver, to ones with screens in its icon) screen saver it hogs the GPU (I'm on a dual G5 2 GHz with radeon 9800pro) and even typing text (Quartz 2D GPU accelerated in 10.4.2 I think) it is slooooow (CPU at 7%). For other screen savers all it is ok (CPU at 3%)

NOTE: try F10, F11, F12.

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I had some issues with using this with Electric-sheep.
Electric-sheep kept outputting text to my terminal.
Seems that Electric-sheep downloads sheep with bit-torrent and when its confused throws some errors to the terminal.
I needed to suppress to avoid having these appear at inopportune times. (aka:ever)
When i got this working it seemed like a bad idea to add this to my .bash_profile script, so i did (just like i never defrag anything, ever and how using the start menu to shutdown a windows box is for chumps)!
before you copy and paste this, make sure

 whereis nice

and

 whereis nohup

return /usr/bin/nice and /usr/bin/nohup, if not you should change the code respectively.
and here is the play by play.

ps

returns the Screen saver process (among others)

grep ScreenSaver

searches for the ScreenSaver.
This will always also return the grep command thats searching for ScreenSaver, so we use

grep -v grep

to remove the grep line

ps |grep ScreenSaver.framework|grep -v grep||

will only run the echo command if the screen-saver isnt running

/usr/bin/nohup

runs a process so it cant be stopped by a hang-up signal (when you close the terminal)

/usr/bin/nice -n 19

sets the following command to play nice, take up to 99% of the cpu if (and only if) the cpu has free cycles.
I stole this from some where that i cant find but i did find where they probably took it from:
http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/software/man/nice.html

/usr/bin/nohup /usr/bin/nice -n 19 

makes a nice uninterruptible process (electric-sheep was ending itself every so often, and so it stays running when the terminal is closed)
And finaly when you put it all together again an excerpt from my ~/.bash_profile:
anyone who can is welcome to try this function out

function stopBgScreen { 
kill -9 `ps | grep ScreenSaver.framework | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
}
}

Notes:
I wanted to include stopBgScreen in this post -> in my bash_profile, just incase anyone wanted it but i couldn't get functions inside of my bash_profile, which sort of redefines the bash_profile experience for me, as it works just fine in the terminal and even persists until log out, but i am having the same problem with alias, so maybe its something i did a long time ago.
Either way your welcome to use stopBgScreen.
Im not sure if the order of nohup -> nice is better then nice ->nohup, but thought it probably was.
That being said I couldn't see any difference.


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The command to use in Leopard (10.5) is:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &



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