4 a screen saver and locker for the X window system
13 The `configure' shell script will attempt to figure out which options are
14 appropriate for your system, and will create config.h and the various
15 Makefiles for you. Run `configure --help' to see how to override these
16 choices, or to specify things like the default installation directory.
17 The file `INSTALL' gives a general overview of use of these sorts of
18 configure scripts (those generated by the GNU autoconf system.)
19 The most important hint is probably this:
21 ./configure --includedir=/opt/Motif/include --libdir=/opt/Motif/lib
23 To build on VMS, see README.VMS.
25 If you think you've found a bug, please let me know; but first, read
26 the enlosed `README.debugging' file to find out what kind of information
27 would be most helpful to include in your bug report.
31 The xscreensaver program waits until the keyboard and mouse have been idle
32 for a period, and then runs a graphics demo chosen at random. It turns off
33 as soon as there is any mouse or keyboard activity.
35 The purpose of xscreensaver is to display pretty pictures on your screen
36 when it is not in use, in keeping with the philosophy that unattended
37 monitors should always be doing something interesting, just like they do
40 However, xscreensaver can also be used as a screen locker, to prevent
41 others from using your terminal while your are away.
43 The benefit that this program has over the combination of the xlock and
44 xautolock programs is the ease with which new graphics hacks can be
45 installed: you don't need to recompile this program to add a new display
46 mode, you just change some resource settings. Any program which can be
47 invoked in such a way that it draws on the root window of the screen can
48 now be used as a screensaver without modification. The programs that
49 are being run as screensavers don't need to have any special knowledge
50 about what it means to be a screensaver.
52 The XIDLE, MIT-SCREEN-SAVER, and/or SGI SCREEN_SAVER server extensions
53 will be used if you have them.
55 The dialog boxes (for locking and demo-mode) look best using Motif, but
56 can be configured to use Athena widgets instead.
58 Also included are several graphics hacks for use as screensavers. There's
59 nothing magic about these: they're just programs that draw on the root
60 window, which are pointed at by the screensaver's default resource settings.
62 qix - My own implementation of this, with many more options
63 than you would have thought qix could have.
64 helix - Generates spirally "stringart" patterns.
65 pedal - Draws a different kind of spirally pattern.
66 rorschach - Random inkblot patterns.
67 attraction - A bouncing ball demo, or a qix-like demo, or a wild
68 color-cycling thing, with some odd rules.
69 greynetic - Random colored/stippled rectangles.
70 rocks - Flying through an asteroid field.
71 blitspin - Rotate a bitmap using bitblts.
72 imsmap - Generates random maps or cloud formations.
73 hypercube - 2d projection of a hypercube rotating on all four axes.
74 slidescreen - Divides the screen into a grid and plays a 16-puzzle on it.
75 decayscreen - A melting effect.
76 jigsaw - Turns the screen into a jigsaw puzzle and shuffles it.
77 halo - Random circular patterns.
78 pyro - Fireworks. Looks a lot like the version in xlock.
79 hopalong - Fractals. I snarfed this code from xlock.
80 flame - Fractals. Also from xlock.
81 noseguy - A guy with a big nose wanders around the screen saying
82 things. I snarfed this code from xnlock.
83 maze - This is the X maze demo modified to take a -root option
84 so that it works with xscreensaver.
85 lmorph - morphing line drawings.
86 bubbles - condensation forms on your monitor, then pops.
87 deco - Generates Brady-Bunch-era wall paneling.
88 moire - Circular interference patterns.
90 kaleidescope - Groovy, man.
91 swirl - Swirly color-cycling patterns.
92 bouboule - Spinning bubbles on a transparent ball.
93 braid - Draws random color-cycling braids around a circle.
94 drift - Drifting recursive fractal cosmic flames.
95 vines - Small, curvy geometric patterns.
96 galaxy - Spinning, colliding galaxies.
97 grav - Orbital simulation and/or cloud chamber.
98 ifs - Spinning, colliding iterated-function-system shapes.
99 julia - Animated rendition of the Julia set.
100 laser - Moving radiating lines.
101 lightning - Crackling fractal lightning bolts.
102 penrose - Quasiperiodic tilings.
103 sierpinski - two-dimensional Sierpinski triangle.
104 slip - Sucks your desktop through a jet engine.
105 spiral - Circular color-cycling interference patterns.
106 strange - Animating strange attractors.
107 flag - A waving flag of an arbitrary bitmap or text.
108 sphere - Draws a bunch of shaded spheres.
109 forest - grows a fractal forest.
110 lisa - draws animated full-loop lisajous figures.
111 lissie - another lisajous path.
112 goop - Squishy transparent oil-and-bubble images
113 starfish - Radially-symmetric throbbing colormap-hacking blobs.
114 munch - The classic 1962-vintage "munching squares" hack.
115 rd-bomb - Reaction-diffusion fractals.
116 coral - Simulation of coral growth, sort of.
117 fadeplot - Draws a swimming ribbon.
118 mountain - Generates mountains on a square grid.
119 triangle - Generates mountains on a triangular grid.
120 worm - Draws wiggly worms.
121 rotor - Draws a rotating spiral pattern.
122 ant - A cellular automaton.
123 xjack - Simulates a schizophrenic typist.
124 xlyap - Calculates and displays Lyapunov exponents.
125 flow - More strange attractors.
126 gears - Draws interlocking rotating gears (GLX only.)
127 morph3d - Draws shiny shape-changing 3d forms (GLX only.)
128 superquadrics - More shiny shape-changing 3d forms (GLX only.)
129 pipes - Generates a field of intertwined plumbing (GLX only.)
130 rubik - Solves a Rubik's Cube (GLX only.)
131 sproingies - Marble Madness meets Q-Bert (GLX only.)
132 stairs - Draws Escher's infinite staircase (GLX only.)
133 cage - Draws Escher's impossible cage (GLX only.)
134 moebius - Draws Escher's Moebius Strip II (GLX only.)
135 atlantis - Draws swimming mammals (GLX only.)
137 All of these will pop up their own window unless given that -root option.
138 See their man pages for more details.
140 Other reasonable things to use as screensavers, if you have them, are
142 xdaliclock -root -builtin2 - melting digital clock
143 xswarm -r 2>&- - swimming sperm
144 xwave -root - random 3d graphs
145 xbouncebits - bounce arbitrary bitmaps around
146 ico -r -p8 -faces -sleep 1 - it's dull, but it's there
147 xv -root file.gif -quit - they don't all have to animate!
148 xsplinefun - bouncing splines
149 xfishtank -c black -d -r 1 - fish (use version 2.0 or later)
150 xmountains -b - very realistic generated mountains
151 xtacy -root - various eye candy
152 xearth -wait 0 -timewarp 400 - the earth as seen from space
153 /usr/demos/bin/bongo - an SGI GL demo
154 /usr/demos/bin/ep -S - another: the stunning ElectroPaint.
155 (Compile hacks/xscreensaver-sgigl.c
156 to use these with xscreensaver.)
158 You can get most of these from the contrib directory on ftp.x.org. If you
159 know of (or write) any other interesting programs that can be used as
160 screensavers, please let me know!
162 The latest version of xscreensaver is always available on the web at
163 http://people.netscape.com/jwz/xscreensaver/.
165 -- Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>
168 Changes since 2.16: Added a -window-id argument to most hacks, so that they
169 can draw on arbitrary externally-provided windows.
170 Synched with xlockmore 4.11a01.
172 Added `atlantis' GL hack.
173 Renamed `puzzle' hack to `jigsaw', since xlock already
174 had a different mode called `puzzle'.
175 Made it self-configure properly when Motif 2.1.0 is
176 being used (requires -lXp now, sigh...)
177 Changes since 2.15: Made `flag' able to do XPM images.
178 New look for the xscreensaver logo (`xroger').
179 Fixed compilation error on Suns with adjunct passwords.
180 Got multi-architecture builds working again.
181 Some configure tweaks for building on HPUX and Solaris.
182 Fixed bug in decayscreen.
183 Fixed typo in passwd.c.
184 Made `cynosure' not die when colormap is full.
185 Changes since 2.14: Added `cynosure' hack.
187 Tweaked `erase.c' some more.
188 Made unfading a bit smoother.
189 Added `vidwhacker' hack (not installed by default.)
191 Split `escher' into `cage' and `moebius', as per
193 Changed subprocess handling to use sigaction() instead
194 of signal() if it's available (this is necessary for
195 SCO but should work fine on other systems too.)
196 Various other tweaks.
197 Changes since 2.13: Better fix for the Motif drag-and-die lossage.
198 Put in some kludges to work around a LessTif bug.
199 XScreenSaver is known to work with LessTif 0.82 now.
200 Made fading work on high-end SGI video hardware.
201 Fixed another SGI-specific bug in screen grabbing;
202 will the madness never cease?
203 Fixed another crash in `xlyap'.
204 Changes since 2.12: Made `decayscreen' do directions other than down.
206 Fixed a crash in `xlyap'.
207 Added CDE info to the man page, removed `cde.txt'.
208 Configure tweaks for Zippy.
209 Turned off the signal handling in `bubbles' because
210 it was sometimes failing to die.
211 Added `hacks/xscreensaver-sgigl.c' to make it possible
212 to run SGI's ElectroPaint hack (/usr/demos/bin/ep)
213 with xscreensaver. Finally!
214 Fixed a buffer overrun in the locking code that some
215 wily, malicious cracker must have slipped in.
216 Disabled Motif drag-and-drool in the dialog box
217 buttons, since it's broken in some old versions of
219 Changes since 2.11: Added `README.debugging'.
222 Added "default-n" as a visual name, so that one can
223 have -install on by default, but turn it off for
224 certain poorly-behaved hacks (like xv.)
225 Added support for grabbing frames of external video
226 (on SGI) to the screen-grabbing hacks (decayscreen,
227 slidescreen, slip, blitspin, and puzzle.)
228 Improved look of tiles in `slidescreen'; fixed its
229 color allocation problem.
230 Changes since 2.10: Tweaked `blitspin', added it to the default list.
231 Added `lissie', `mountain', `triangle', `worm',
232 `rotor', and `ant' from xlockmore.
233 Updated `sierpinski', `galaxy', and `lisa'.
234 Thickened the lines in `braid' and `lmorph'.
235 Updated VMS makefiles.
236 Renamed `fract' to `vines'.
238 Made a few more hacks use erase.c, and added a few
240 Fixed compilation problem with Sun's version of OpenGL.
241 Added ability to use sigaction() instead of signal()
242 to work around a SCO kernel bug.
243 Changes since 2.09: Fixed colormap bugs in `rd-bomb'; sped up `coral'.
244 Configure tweaks for *BSD.
245 Changes since 2.07: New hacks `rd-bomb' and `coral'.
246 New version of `maze' with some new algorithms.
247 New colorized version of `rocks'.
248 Fixed a bug in qix on 64-bit machines.
249 Fixed a bug in the -time option.
250 Fixed a bug in configure related to LessTif.
251 Changes since 2.06: Minor header tweaks in windows.c and flag.c.
252 Made multi-architecture (VPATH) builds work properly.
253 Merged new GL stuff from xlockmore (rubik, morph3d.)
254 Fixed intermittent crashes in `imsmap' and `munch'.
255 Added `fadeplot' hack from xlockmore.
256 Changes since 2.05: Merged in VMS support from Patrick Moreau.
257 Changes since 2.04: Fixed a MIT-SCREEN-SAVER-related crash, and tweaked
258 configure to detect the extra-random -Xss library.
259 Changes since 2.03: HP configure tweaks. Detect and warn about LessTif.
260 Fixed low-color behavior of `goop', `pyro', `starfish',
261 `greynetic', `flame', `halo', and `moire'.
262 Changes since 2.02: Fixed flicker in `pipes'. Fixed 3d in `bouboule'.
264 Added basic dependencies to the Makefile.in files.
265 Changes since 2.01: Fixes for compiling with the MIT saver extension.
266 Made the yow/fortune program be a configure option.
267 Various configure tweaks.
268 Changes since 2.00: Added `goop' and `starfish' hacks.
269 Added colomap cycling to `halo'.
270 Made `attraction' use the new colormap allocator.
271 Added better $PATH diagnostics.
272 There was a bug in frand! Color selection should be
274 Changes since 1.34: Converted to use `configure' instead of `imake'.
275 ANSI C is now required.
276 Added Kerberos locking support, from Nat Lanza.
277 Made the stderr text use overlay planes, if possible.
278 Reworked the xlockmore compatibility stuff again.
279 Added `gears', `superquadrics', `escher', `pipes',
280 and `sproingies' hacks (depend on OpenGL.)
281 Changes since 1.33: Fixed some bugs, made fading be a little smoother.
282 Changes since 1.32: Made it work with multi-headed displays.
283 Generalized sub-process management (Unix sucks!)
284 Added interactive mouse frobbing to Julia.
285 Added (untested) support for HPUX shadow passwords.
286 Made normal non-shadow passwords be checked if the
287 shadow passwords aren't accessible for some reason.
288 Changes since 1.31: Removed *colorPrograms and *monoPrograms resources:
289 made it possible to specify the desired visual on a
291 Cleaned up / restructured the driver: no more globals.
292 Made the Motif and Athena dialogs share more code.
293 Probably fixed some Athena colormap-installation bugs.
294 Fixed screen grabbing (cmap) on SGI 12-bit PseudoColor.
295 Fixed divide-by-zero in bright random colormaps.
296 Added an improved version of xlock's `flag' hack.
297 Made unfading work better, and not flicker on SGIs.
298 Added `sphere', `forest', `lisa' hacks from xlockmore.
299 Added (untested) support for SunOS Adjunct passwords.
300 Changes since 1.30: Improved colors and colormap cycling of many hacks.
301 Cleaned up xlockmore compatibility layer.
302 Made `blitspin' able to grab an image off the screen.
303 Ported `swirl' and `bouboule' hacks from xlockmore.
304 Made the driver more careful about not leaving bits on
305 the screen, or allowing other windows to raise
306 themselves: it now re-blanks the screen every so often.
307 Added `-time' option to `xscreensaver-command'.
308 Improved SGI screen-grabbing some more: now it can grab
309 TrueColor screens into PseudoColor windows and have the
310 colors still come out semi-reasonably.
311 Changes since 1.29: Made `slidescreen' and `decayscreen' work better on
312 SGIs when windows of different visuals are present, by
313 using the XReadDisplay() extension to get a true 24-bit
314 image out of the frame buffer.
315 Made `noseguy' be in color, if compiled with XPM.
316 Ported `braid', `drift', `fract', `galaxy', `grav',
317 `ifs', `julia', `laser', `lightning', `penrose',
318 `sierpinski', `slip', `spiral', and `strange' hacks
320 Merged `hopalong' hack with a more recent version.
322 Changes since 1.27: Added `deco', `moire', and `kaleidescope' hacks.
323 Merged in support for non-Motif locking and demo mode.
324 Made `blitspin' and `bubbles' work in TrueColor.
325 Fixed a stupid bug I introduced in `imsmap'.
326 Added `poly' and `gravity' options to `qix'.
327 Changes since 1.26: Added support for SGI SCREEN_SAVER extension.
328 Made `fade' and `unfade' work on 8-bit SGIs.
329 Made the dialog boxes more Motify.
330 Added `bubbles' hack.
331 Changes since 1.25: Added `lmorph' hack.
332 Added viscosity and mouse-control to attraction.
333 Fixed possible bad color choices in qix and attraction.
334 Added ramp-mode to halo.
335 Added a new RNG, which is faster and more portable
336 than using the RNG in libc.
337 Made locking work on SCO.
338 Various other minor tweaks that I don't remember.
339 Changes since 1.24: Made it capture the stdout/stderr of its subprocesses
340 and present them on the screensaver window itself.
341 Made demo mode work correctly with non-default visuals
342 and color maps, instead of always using the defaults.
343 Added -visual argument to all included screenhacks.
344 Support for the R6 MIT-SCREEN-SAVER server extension.
345 Made the demo mode list scroll properly.
347 Changes since 1.23: Fixed some private-colormap oddities in slidescreen,
348 decayscreen, and xroger. Fixed apparent conservation-
349 of-mass problem in pyro; made the shrapnel round.
350 Changes since 1.22: Minor tweaks for IRIX5; fixed locking race condition.
351 Changes since 1.21: Minor tweaks for X11R6.
352 Fixes for non-default visuals.
353 Changes since 1.20: Fixed bug in color blitspin; added default image.
354 Added diagnostics to noseguy. Fixed off-by-one
355 error in flame. Added some missing casts.
356 Changes since 1.18: Added `flame' hack.
357 Fixed a minor Motif dialog text field bug.
358 Fixed yet another XPointer-not-defined-in-R4 bug.
359 Changes since 1.17: Added support for shadow password files.
360 Fixed some Motif-related locking bugs.
361 Added diagnostics when locking is disabled.
362 Made blitspin able to use the XPM library.
363 Added `decayscreen' hack.
364 Changes since 1.16: Added `halo' hack.
365 Changes since 1.15: Portability fixes.
366 Changes since 1.14: Broke the driver up into more source files.
367 Moved the hacks into their own directory.
368 Made all `time' parameters accept the 00:00:00 syntax,
369 so that even the parameters which are normally read as
370 minutes can be specified in seconds.
371 Added colormap cycling to `imsmap'.
372 Made hyper work with K&R compilers.
373 Changes since 1.13: Added `orbit' option to `attraction' hack.
374 Added `lock-timeout' option.
375 Cleaned up options of `maze' hack.
376 Changes since 1.8: Added demo mode, and locking.
378 Added `norotate' option to `rocks' hack.
projects / xscreensaver / blob