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Feb 24

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Installing screen saver in Ubuntu 11.10

As you probably know new Ubuntu 11.10 doesn’t have screen saver. When you press combination of Ctrl + Alt + L to lock your screen there is only a black screen. If you want some fancy screen savers you have to install it. It’s easy to do and you’ll probably find lots of quick tutorials how to do it.

The most of those tutorials in few steps tell you how to install XScreenSaver which is, I guess, most popular one. Those tutorials looks usually like this one:

  1. Remove gnome screen saver which is the blank screen fired after pressing lock shortcut:
    sudo apt-get remove gnome-screensaver
  2. Install XScreenSaver with plugins:
    sudo apt-get install xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra
  3. And add to startup applications new screensaver’s command:
    xscreensaver -nosplash

I followed this one if you need confirmation of instructions above ;)

After that you can open your dash and run XScreenSaver to be able preview lots of new screen savers. It took me a while till I found my favorited ones. Finally I chose one and got back to work ;) But after a while I needed a coffee. I headed to the kitchen but before leaving my desk I automatically pressed Ctrl + Alt + L to lock my screen. An error occurred with information that it couldn’t find gnome-screensaver app. Of course it couldn’t — I had had removed it :) But it took me a while to fine on the Internet the solution which is quite simple and I hope will help some of you as it helped me.

Go to your terminal and create new symlink:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/xscreensaver-command /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command

That’s all! After creating it the Ctrl + Alt + L works perfectly and I can go for my coffee ;)

Cheers.

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.lukaszewski.it/2012/02/24/installing-screen-saver-in-ubuntu-11-10/

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