Some Windows users at work were recently surprised to return to their locked workstations and see their personal photos displaying on-screen. A new IT policy had set everybody's screensaver to one which picks images from their photos directory. As I rebel Linux user I was of course immune from this.
Of course. Until I found the same thing happen to me today. My monitor was displaying a screenshot of a beta version of one our products, with an infelicity highlighted -- I'd made the screen grab months ago to attach to a bug report, and I can believe the file is still lying around in a subdirectory. I'd left Gnome Screensaver on the default 'random' setting, where it picks a screensaver from its big list each time it's activated. Apparently there's one in there which shows photos. But, hatefully, the screensaver preferences window doesn't indicate the most recently used screensaver, so I have to scroll through the list for likely looking names. Hmmm, 'SlideScreen' perhaps is a slide-show on a screen? Nope. 'F-Spot photos'? No, that requires photos to be 'tagged', apparently. Ah, 'Pictures folder' (as though Linux has "folder"s, of course). Seems promising. Now let's click on the per-screensaver options button to tweak what this is doing, maybe change the directory it's looking in. Wait. _What_ button? There no longer is any such button. Individual screensavers no longer have options, or at least no longer have UI for changing any options. (Possibly I'm remembering this button from XScreensaver rather than a previous version of Gnome Screensaver, but that isn't particularly relevant since it's a conceptual ancestor if not a code ancestor -- and whatever the software was called, the button used to be there, in the preferences for the screensaver Gnome was running.) So, where's it getting my 'Pictures folder' from? I've some vague recollection of Gnome having a list somewhere of a pictures directory, a music directory, a documents directory and so on. And occasionally ~/Desktop/ or ~/Documents/ or something seem to appear (which I rmdir), or the contents of ~/ appear as icons on the desktop, but I've never quite worked out how or why. Let's have a look in preferences -- nope, can't see anything which looks related to home directory or folders. Maybe it's one of those hidden prefs? Let's crank up GConf Editor. I tried searching for every string which could possibly be related, but none of them showed up. So this isn't just one of those hates where the solution involves knowledge and dedication it's unreasonable to expect of a typical desktop user; it's one where even with that effort, the fix still isn't apparent. I truly do not know how to set which directory that screensaver is looking for images in. OK, so let's remove it from the list of screensavers it cycles through; let's click on a screen saver then Shift+click on another to highlight a bunch of ... no, that no longer works either. The ability to select a group of screensavers has, hatefully, also disappeared. So the only way to avoid Gnome from sometimes picking any image at all from anywhere under my home directory and sometimes displaying it is to pick just one screensaver? Apparently so. I quite liked the variety, of occasionally seeing a screensaver I hadn't spotted before. Hang on, what was that GConf setting I spotted while looking for the directory setting? /apps/gnome-screensaver/themes appears to be a list, not a string. Oooh, if I use the gui preferences window to set the screensaver to 'Random' then that setting becomes a list of all of the screensavers, which it will randomly pick from. So all I have to do is remove 'Pictures folder' from that list. Oooh, finally we're getting somewhere. Well, except none of the list entries is called anything like screensavers-pictures-folder, so I can't spot what command name corresponds to that public-facing name. Right, back to the gui. Let's select 'Pictures folder' and watch the GConf setting change. A-ha, it's a list of one item: screensavers-personal-slideshow. Right, now back to 'Random', edit the list again (which somewhat peversely is in _reverse_ alphabetical order), and remove screensavers-personal-slideshow. I _think_ that's done it. Wow. What a palaver. Smylers
