How to run gnome-screenasaver slideshow manually

[raghu1111]

What I am trying to achieve:

I have selected photo slide show as the screensaver and normally it activates after 5min of inactivity and 'power saving' turns off monitor after 15min.

Occasionally I would like to run the same slideshow for one hour without interruption by the gnome-screen saver. (Ideally in a script so that it could be launched with one click).

One way to do this would be :
#!/bin/bash
#disable screen saver temporarily
gnome-scrensaver-command -i &
PID=`jobs -p`

#find the right args for gnome-screensaver slideshow
/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-sreensaver/slideshow

# or run some other slideshow

sleep 3600
kill $PID


Two questions with the above approach :
1. How can we start "/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-sreensaver/slideshow" same way that gnome-screensaver would?
2. will 'gnome-screensaver-command -i' command also prevent power management from turning off the monitor?

[raghu1111]

The following script does pretty much exactly what I need.

It requires 'xte' and 'xprintidle'. It uses glslideshow for slideshow. Search this forum for how to configure photo directory for it. This is a much better slideshow than the default in gnome-screensaver. The script does the following :

disable gnome-screen-saver and store the pid.
obtain "window-id" for the desktop background using xwininfo.
move cursor to right bottom corner (so that it does not appear over the photos.
wait for 30 minutes before stopping the slideshow.
there is no easy way for the user to kill the slideshow. So watch for any user activity during this time.


#!/bin/bash

#disable screen saver while running slideshow
gnome-screensaver-command -r "slideshow" -i &
PID=`jobs -p`

#get the window id
WID=`xwininfo -name x-nautilus-desktop | grep 'Window id:' | awk '{print $4}'`

#move the mouse to bottom right corner
WIDTH=`xwininfo -id $WID | grep Width: | awk '{print $2}'`
HEIGHT=`xwininfo -id $WID | grep Height: | awk '{print $2}'`
xte 'mousemove $WIDTH $HEIGHT'

/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -fade 5 -pan 12 -duration 12 -window-id $WID &
SLIDESHOW=`jobs -p`

ENDTIME=`expr \`date +%s\` + 1800`
sleep 2

#wait for any input on the screen to end the slideshow

while [ `date +%s` -lt $ENDTIME ] && [ `xprintidle` -gt 1000 ]; do
sleep 0.2
done

kill $SLIDESHOW
kill $PID