[HowTo] Electric Sheep screensaver (13 MATE)

[MintRainbow]

If any Linux newb coming from Windows should know, Electric Sheep is a screensaveer made of awesomeness, unicorns and rainbows. But if one were to install it without any other human intervention than the act of installing it, then it will not show up -- Period. How does one fix this?

I first looked around for the various installed files for packages electricsheep and mate-screensaver. Then I found that the screensavers show up based on desktop files in "/usr/share/applications/screensavers".

I discovered that indeed, an entry for Electric Sheep did exist (/ElectricSheep). I opened pluma as root -- in a terminal,

Code: Select all

gksu pluma /usr/share/applications/screensavers/electricsheep.desktop

-- And saw that line 10 had this:
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;KDE;XFCE

All one wanting Electric Sheep to show up has to do is append ;MATE to the string in line 10, so it looked like this;
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;KDE;XFCE;MATE
Revision 01/12/13: Removing or commenting line 10 will also suffice. Timing, I know, but yeah.

Saved it, looked in my screensavers and there it was! Hope this helps people. For the more tech-illeterate among us, I'll upload a copy of ElectricSheep.desktop on request, along with a wget command to replace what came with the electricsheep package.Saved it, looked in my screensavers and there it was! Hope this helps people.

Or, you know, the Mint team can repack electricsheep with the modified .desktop file as per my discovery...

EDIT: Widescreen monitors
For people with wider screens (16:9 or similar), install mplayer. mplayer2 will be removed, but mint-meta-core (Assumed required for future updates) will remain unaffected. Once installed, and mplayer2 removed (listed as a conflict), then use of the default driver, "gl" or "xv" in electricsheep-preferences will show the pretty fractals in stretched widescreen, just like in Ubuntu.

With either mplayer or mplayer2, use of "x11" as specified driver will show a cropped screen instead of the widescreen format shown in the mate-screensaver-preferences preview within the dialog.

[Oscar799]

Moved here by moderator

[lux_]

This worked for me.
It would have taken me hours to find this, I may have even overlooked it all together.

[calexil]

REVISION*****IT WORKS NOW!!!!!<<<<NO IDEA WHY?!

[twimmer]

found the file and edited it ......still not working...reinstalled electricsheep, .....still not working....newest kernel still........not..........werk-____-

I followed the same instructions and it never worked for me as well Wonder why its not working?

[p.vogt]

This worked for me. Thanks.
One question: where or how do I configure the settings for it since the Screensaver Preferences does not show a way?

Edit:
Nevermind. I just type 'electricsheep-preferences' in a terminal.

[3×5]

I got it to work. Nice!

Is electric sheep rasterized? Maybe I don't totally understand the concept. When I use Project M, I can see that my GPU is really cranking out the geometry, that it's rendering things in real time. Electric Sheep looks a little rasterized and compressed to me.

[MintRainbow]

I cannot get it to work in Mint 15. Interesting the desktop file fix doesn't work either, forcing the use of xscreensaver and the mate screensaver daemon to be replaced for sure-fire compatibility.

Man that sucks.