electricsheep screensaver won't start

Question

After the installation of electricsheep, the screensaver won't work: it starts fading to black then, when it should display the screensaver, it suddenly goes back to desktop. I read that disabling compiz should fix this behaviour but I don't want to go 2d-unity. I'm using Natty. Any suggestion?

Answer 1

I found a whole lot of posts talking about this kind of problem: it doesn't seems to be related to electrisheep but to gnome-screensaver itself.

I tried with some stock screensavers experiencing the same behaviour: I then installed XScreenSaver and it works like a charm (googling for how to use electricsheep with XScreenSaver it wasn't that hard...)

How-to:

1. open a terminal and sudo aptitude install xscreensaver electricsheep
2. open "startup applications", click "add" and put as a command xscreensaver -nosplash
3. open ~/.xscreensaver (gedit ~/.xscreensaver): at the bottom of the screensaver's list you'll have to add GL: electricsheep --root 1 \n\ , otherwise you'll not be able to see it in xscreensaver
4. in a terminal or via ALT+F2 write xscreensaver-demo to set it up: you can also manage your power saving settings
5. log out and log back in (or reboot)