Why is xscreensaver removed in favor of gnome-screensaver

[Miles Lane]

On 2/17/06, Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 09:11:40PM -0500, Miles Lane wrote:
> > Will the screensavers in xscreensaver be ported to gnome-screensaver?
>
> They're not supposed to require porting, but gnome-screensaver requires
> a .desktop file to be present to describe each of the screensavers which
> it will use, and xscreensaver doesn't provide them.
>
> The %post and %trigger scripts in the gnome-screensaver package are
> supposed to create these .desktop files automatically.  This didn't used
> to work perfectly, but it should be fixed as of 2.13.90-4, so if you're
> still seeing the problem with that version, we need to know.

Okay, I removed gnome-screensaver and all the xscreensaver packages
and reinstalled them (xscreensaver-base didn't get installed).
Now I see the xscreensaver savers listed in the gnome-screensaver
configuration dialog.

A problem I have with gnome-screensaver is that I cannot configure the
xscreensaver savers.  For example, I cannot tell any of the savers
that use images from the hard drive where to find the images.  I
cannot specify the Glidescope tube size, speed, and movement settings.
I can't tell the Interaggregate or Substrate savers how many seeds to use, etc.

The rendering of the Superquadratics saver is all messed up.  Hidden
sides are sometimes being rendered in front, munging the forms.  This
problem is also showing up with Polyhedra, Menger, Lament, Juggler3D,
Gears, GLHanoi, Flying Toasters, FlipFlop, Cube 21, etc.

I only see "4D Hypertorus" (which appears to map to the xscreensaver
ribbon hypertorus saver.  I prefer the solid (transparent) hypertorus,
but cannot find it in the savers list.

Another issue is that "popsquares" saver isn't working at all.  Oddly,
there is also a "Pop art squares" saver that does work.  The
"popsquares" entry is at the bottom of the savers list.