First Really New Electric Sheep Client in Two Years

[Polygon]

Well I dont think it crashed, I was using it normally and then i just saw all those mplayer processes.

But i will try what you suggested about the xscreensaver thing

[spotspot]

Well I dont think it crashed, I was using it normally and then i just saw all those mplayer processes.

But i will try what you suggested about the xscreensaver thing

Thanks for helping with the beta testing. I can't explain it, I also don't think it's crashing.

I used "gnome-screesaver-command --activate" to bring it up and each time immediately killed it by hitting a key. After about 10 times I saw an extra mplayer process appear. Just killing this process did not remove it, I had to kill -9 it.

Then I tried to make it fail again, and I must have started and killed 50 times when suddenly, when the screensaver came up, it was just black. But still no extra processes, and starting it again continues to work fine.... And then it drops another process.

When electric sheep exits and kills its children, it uses SIGTERM. If mplayer has become stuck enough that it requires a SIGKILL then I think this behavior would result. Perhaps because the process which mplayer is reading from through the pipe is killed first? Could it be an mplayer bug?

Maybe we could work around it like this: on exit, delivering SIGTERM to mplayer, sleep a bit, and then SIGKILL, then killing the process group with SIGTERM, including myself. I would rather really know what was going on before I do this though...

I noticed that according to ps the leftover mplayer process is in state SN and the tty associated with it is just "?".

[Anduu]

try putting

stop-xscreensaver = "no"

in your ~/.mplayer/config file. I am going to test this more and if it works, make it automatic (with a different mechanism than editing your config file of course).

That was the first thing I thought of trying but it didn't help.

[spotspot]

That was the first thing I thought of trying but it didn't help.

Yea didn't work for me either. It did allow the screensaver and power-saving to come on while playing an movie from the command line with mplayer, but it did not allow the power-saving to come on when mplayer is running as the screensaver (getting a video feed from electric sheep).

[spotspot]

Yea didn't work for me either. It did allow the screensaver and power-saving to come on while playing an movie from the command line with mplayer, but it did not allow the power-saving to come on when mplayer is running as the screensaver (getting a video feed from electric sheep).

ok well i guess it will remain a mystery a little longer. i'm going to package what we have, it seems to basically work, and maybe with more eyes we can iron these out.

[Anduu]

ok well i guess it will remain a mystery a little longer. i'm going to package what we have, it seems to basically work, and maybe with more eyes we can iron these out.

Oh well...I'm sure somewhere along the line the light bulb will come on

I fiddled a bit.Tried changing the nice level but it wouldn't launch at all.I blame that on gnome-screensaver because launching from the command line with nice worked fine.

Everything else for me has been working great...no orphaned mplayer instances floating around.

As always thanks spot!

[spotspot]

Ok now we have a PPA with FLAM3 and Electric Sheep working:
https://launchpad.net/~flam3/+archive
Thanks Erik!

[EReckase]

Note: These are still works in progress. I've identified a few issues with the gconf keys that I've just fixed, as well as some other issues, so there will be numerous builds over the next few days.

That said, here's the apt line you need to add to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/flam3/ubuntu hardy main


Please let me know if you have any issues with these new packages.

Thanks! Special thanks to joaopinto at #getdeb for his assistance & advice in getting the electricsheep package built.

--Erik

[zmjjmz]

Just to be sure, the Electric Sheep in the etch repos isn't a new one, right?
Because it's only displaying on a portion of the screen on my T20.

[smartboyathome]

How would one get this to go fullscreen from the terminal? I can only make it run in a window using mplayer, which is not what I want.