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Last night I switched from Linux Mint 13 Xfce to Mate and just like Xfce, there was a limited amount of screensavers. Adding more through Xfce was an easy task using the Synaptic Package Manager. Attempting the same thing with Mate led to frustration and an endless amount of internet searches. Although I never found a definitive answer throughout all of my searches, I did manage to figure something out that worked for me.

Since I could not find a working tutorial on this subject, I decided to write one and I hope it works for you as well as it has worked for me. I will break this down into five steps.

Let's begin:

1. This step can be done either through the Terminal or the Synaptic Package Manager.
In your favorite terminal, type or copy and paste this: If you use Synaptic, find gnome-screensaver and mark it for removal, then find and mark these packages for installation: xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra
then click Apply and let it do it's thing.
* When I performed the above operation through the terminal, it reported that I never had gnome-screensaver installed, just something you may want to be aware of.
2. Open the Control Center and navigate to Startup Applications and add the entry in this screenshot:

and make sure it is checked.
3. Open Screensaver and see if the changes took place. If so, awesome! No need to go on. If not, continue to the next step.
* You could also try logging out or restarting the computer, but I didn't need to do either to see the changes.
4. Open your terminal and type: 5. Open Screensaver again and you should see the XScreensaver screen with a lot more screensavers like in the screenshot below. Enjoy!


I borrowed the information in steps 1 and 2 from this thread: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 13&start=0
which didn't work for me, but I managed to figure out step 4 on my own which was the missing piece of the puzzle.

I hope you found this tutorial useful. Please let me know if if worked for you. Thanks.

Thank you for this, it was indeed very helpful. I am running Linux Mint 13 MATE and installed Xscreensavers to have more variety. The upshot was I ended up with two screensaver control entries in the main menu.

Your tutorial showed me

a) How to uninstall mate-screensavers. (I was trying to uninstall gnome-screensavers which no longer exists as I'm running MATE)

and

b) How to set up the command for the Xscreensavers daemon in the system startup section.

Many thanks.

linuxexplorer wrote:Thank you for this, it was indeed very helpful. I am running Linux Mint 13 MATE and installed Xscreensavers to have more variety. The upshot was I ended up with two screensaver control entries in the main menu.

Your tutorial showed me

a) How to uninstall mate-screensavers. (I was trying to uninstall gnome-screensavers which no longer exists as I'm running MATE)

and

b) How to set up the command for the Xscreensavers daemon in the system startup section.

Many thanks.

You're very welcome! I'm glad it was helpful and worked for you!

Perfect!

I'm a Linux novice and your tutorial was spot on. I was able to execute the instructions without a problem and now I have more screensavers.

agm8036 wrote:Perfect!

I'm a Linux novice and your tutorial was spot on. I was able to execute the instructions without a problem and now I have more screensavers.

Great to hear and thanks for the feedback!

Hi internalrage:

Although I really enjoy perusing countless screensavers, the xscreensaver program seems a bit buggy, so not sure I will keep unless things smooth out. For example, I checked and then unchecked "lock screen" and yet, sometimes I still need to wait a bit before waking and still log back in after computer suspends (sleeps). After waking up from a full hibernation, the screen saver shows up as opposed to the last monitor view... although no big deal, as I can simply keystroke the screensaver away. Also (and I might do separate post on this issue), have not figured out, for sure, whether xscreensaver settings for power management supercede MATE's power management preferences or vice versa. Eventually, I might go back to MATE's simple screen saver if the bugs do not iron out.

Still, really appreciate your little tutorial, and have enjoyed playing around w/ many screensavers.
Thank you.

jaderiver

Hi internalrage:

Although I really enjoy perusing countless screensavers, the xscreensaver program seems a bit buggy, so not sure I will keep unless things smooth out. For example, I checked and then unchecked "lock screen" and yet, sometimes I still need to wait a bit before waking and still log back in after computer suspends (sleeps). After waking up from a full hibernation, the screen saver shows up as opposed to the last monitor view... although no big deal, as I can simply keystroke the screensaver away. Also (and I might do separate post on this issue), have not figured out, for sure, whether xscreensaver settings for power management supercede MATE's power management preferences or vice versa. Eventually, I might go back to MATE's simple screen saver if the bugs do not iron out.

Still, really appreciate your little tutorial, and have enjoyed playing around w/ many screensavers.
Thank you.

jaderiver

jaderiver wrote:Hi internalrage:

Although I really enjoy perusing countless screensavers, the xscreensaver program seems a bit buggy, so not sure I will keep unless things smooth out. For example, I checked and then unchecked "lock screen" and yet, sometimes I still need to wait a bit before waking and still log back in after computer suspends (sleeps). After waking up from a full hibernation, the screen saver shows up as opposed to the last monitor view... although no big deal, as I can simply keystroke the screensaver away. Also (and I might do separate post on this issue), have not figured out, for sure, whether xscreensaver settings for power management supercede MATE's power management preferences or vice versa. Eventually, I might go back to MATE's simple screen saver if the bugs do not iron out.

Still, really appreciate your little tutorial, and have enjoyed playing around w/ many screensavers.
Thank you.

jaderiver

Hello jaderiver,

I haven't experienced any of the issues you mentioned so I would not be of much help. As for whether or not Xscreensaver's power management supersedes Mate's, I would be interested to know that too. I hope you can get your issues resolved.

internalrage

internalrage wrote: ....As for whether or not Xscreensaver's power management supersedes Mate's, I would be interested to know that too. I hope you can get your issues resolved.

internalrage

internalrage:

After a couple of sessions observing screensaver/suspend actions of my computer, Mint's Power Manager settings superseded the time periods specified by xscreensaver, in terms of when to go to screen saver, and then suspend (sleep). The issue is not black or white, however, because the screen turned completely off for five minutes before suspending. This command was specified in my xscreensaver settings (which were slated to happen thirty minutes later), and there is no such setting in Mint's Power Manager. There seems to be a melding of the two programs to determine what to do.

jaderiver

Helped me a lot.
Set a Lament screensaver, since I'm a fan of Hellraiser.

FYI - Referring back to my previous posts, note that my ASUS U56E was one of the computer models which needed to have a special script programmed to enable its Suspend/Sleep function to work with Mint MATE. This script may also be affecting my computer's use of xscreensaver. Still, even with the slight bugginess, I am enjoying the basic xscreensaver package for now and have uninstalled all the extras such as data-extra and gl-extra.

jaderiver

Thank you so much for this tutorial! However, I am having one issue that is driving me nuts. Upon resume from suspend, xscreensaver is requiring me to enter my password. Any idea how to defeat this?

Hi all here another method to avoid uninstall mate-screensaver:
http://greyblake.com/blog/2013/02/02/in ... e-desktop/

It worked for me - Thank you

I followed the instructions and installed the Xscreensavers, then removed the Mate screen savers (I'm on Mate 17). The Xscreen savers seem to work pretty well, but maybe a little buggy, but the problem is, it seems to have slowed down the boot process, it takes longer to boot up now. (This is a new installation)
I've noticed that with a few of the screensavers provided, the machine doesn't recover from the screen saver and must be rebooted.
Any tips? If that's how Xscreensavers work, I might want to go back with the Mate screensavers, that would pretty much be a reverse of the things I did to get the X savers, Correct?

GreyBeard
Window is gone forever.