howto set your background to electric sheep screensaver

[Triorph]

Xwinwrap is a great tool, designed for use with the beryl window management system for making movies run in mplayer or screensavers from xscreensaver run as your background.

electricsheep is a screensaver which creates and shares different patterns via bittorrent, some of these patterns look very nice and some people want to be able to use them with xwinwrap's screensaver setting.

I am basing my work off of this thread: (xgl desktop screensaver script)

Currently this has been tested on my i386 ubuntu edgy eft system, using an nvidia graphics card, aiglx and beryl. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't work on any other of the architectures though. I will not handle support for getting your beryl working, I will assume you have already got it working on your own. This method will work by changing electricsheep so it uses the mplayer engine to play its files.

I'd suggest you take a look at the above link first, however it is not necessary.
First you will need to add the multiverse ubuntu repository to install mplayer.

 sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and then add the lines

 deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy multiverse
deb-src http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy multiverse

Second you will need to install xwinwrap, mplayer and electricsheep, so

sudo apt-get install  electricsheep mplayer 
wget http://3v1n0.tuxfamily.org/pool/edgy/beryl-svn/xwinwrap_0.1+cvs20060209_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i xwinwrap_0.1+cvs20060209_i386.deb

after doing so you should be able to run electricsheep in a window, using the mplayer engine

Just a note, the electricsheep program requires mpg files to play, so you will have to let it download some via bittorrent or download some manually to your cache directory (~/.sheep/), a tutorial to do this manually can be found here

 electricsheep --mplayer 1

once you have electricsheep working, and if xwinwrap works as from the tutorial above, you should just be able to run

 xwinwrap -ni -o 0.3 -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- /usr/bin/electricsheep --mplayer 1 -window-id WID &

and to close

 killall electricsheep

The following script is based on the script in the link at the top of this tutorial.

I'm going to call the script xwinsheep, so we will first

 sudo gedit /usr/bin/xwinsheep

then fill this into the file and save

 #!/bin/bash

# 
# This script runs the electric sheep screensaver on your desktop,
# and drops the name of the screensaver in a marker file.
# When run a second time, it will kill the screensaver.
# Requires xwinwrap to be installed.
# Usage: xwinsheep <OPACITY> <NICENESS> 
# e.g "xwinsheep 0.3 10" will run it at 0.3 opacity
# with a niceness value of 10. Just running "xwinsheep" will
# run it at 1.0 opacity and 19 niceness.


# dir to write marker file to
DIR=~/

#Niceness to run screen saver at. The lower this value, the higher
#priority the screensaver will be. The higher the value, the jerkier
#the screensaver will be, and the less it will intefere with your
#work
NICENESS=$2
if [ -z "$2" ]
then
  NICENESS=19
fi

 

OPACITY=$1
if [ -z $1 ]
then
  OPACITY=1.0
fi

  

if [ -e $DIR.flipflopmarker2 ]
then
	#shows that electric sheep is running via this script
	#kill it, remove the marker file
	killall electricsheep 
	rm $DIR.flipflopmarker2
	exit
fi
	#start the screensaver, write the name of it to a file
	nice -n $NICENESS xwinwrap -ni  -o $OPACITY -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- /usr/bin/electricsheep --mplayer 1  -window-id WID &
	touch $DIR.flipflopmarker2

exit

then just make the script executable

 chmod 755 /usr/bin/xwinsheep

I hope this helps.

[pay]

A screenshot would be nice

[Triorph]

A screenshot would be nice

here goes

[pay]

That looks pretty cool. I'll try this tomorrow morning

[stalefries]

Have you guys found a way to run electricsheep with gnome-screensaver? It doesn't seem to work for me.

[groggyboy]

does the xwinrap plugin require the SVN beryl, or will beryl from the regular repo work?

[Triorph]

I haven't found anyway to get electric sheep to work with gnome-screensaver, it does however have support with xscreensaver.

I was using the beryl-svn repos originally but there were some stability issues so i downgraded to the normal repos and xwinwrap still runs fine on normal beryl (0.2.0 i believe)

[EReckase]

I've submitted a howto on how to get Electric Sheep running under gnome-screensaver, but it's waiting to be approved. If you're interested, I'll be happy to forward a copy of the text to private messages - just let me know.

[cprophecy]

Triorph:

THANKYOUSIR!
awesome writeup man. i cant thank you enough. made it so easy

edit:
hmm it seems i found an issue. when i click the 'show desktop' icon in the bottom right it turns off the electricsheep background. is there a way to fix this?

[Triorph]

I checked and the show desktop button does the same to me aswell, i don't really know enough on the topic on how to fix that, but beryl has options for its own show desktop that doesn't get rid of the screensaver background, try removing the showdesktop button from the bottom right corner, then in beryl-settings-manager edit the bottom right corner to do either "show desktop" or "fade to desktop" (depending on which you prefer)