Dream a little Dream… November 27, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , trackbackI recently (about 4 minutes ago) configured my screensaver to use good ol’ ElectricSheep. The premise of this screensaver is based off of Philip K Dick’s novel _Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep_. More information can be found at www.electricsheep.org, but here is a little synopsis:
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.
Back in the days when I was a Mac user, I used this screensaver regularly. Getting it running on SLED 10 and now openSUSE 10.1 seemed to be a little hassel though. I started by trying to install the “stock” RPM, but soon ran into Dependency Hell(TM). It was not long after that little nightmare that I found Lenz’s Blog. Lucky for me, Lenz had a version of ElectricSheep that works on openSUSE 10.1.
After an easy install, I was ready to get down to business. I fired up the “Control Center” went to “ScreenSaver” but alas, no ElectricSheep in the list. I was puzzled. I checked the RPM and it did install the screensaver config file (an XML file in /etc/xscreensaver/ if anyone cares) so what could be going wrong? Welp, this is when I discovered that gnome-screensaver cripples your shizzel. It turns out that our buddies at gnome have decided that if you use the screensaver control console through gnome, you don’t want to see the list of all screensavers available to xscreensaver, so they only show you the “popular ones.” I suppose I should have noticed it sooner, xscreensaver installs about 100 (mostly crappy) screensavers and when I was poking through the gnome interface, I only saw about seven.
The good news is the fix is quick and easy. I used rug to remove the gnome-screensaver package. Nice thing about using rug for this is that you won’t get caught in Dependency Hell(TM) as rug resolves dependencies. An easy fix and I am now up and screensaving.
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