From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050308 Firefox/1.0.1 Fedora/1.0.1-5 Description of problem: When a screensaver starts I get an error message saying there is an exit status of 1. The screen fades in and out just as it should, but doesn't actually display any screen savers. In gnome, if I look at the screensaver panel under preferences it only lists one screensaver (ant) and does not display anything when I preview it. Occationally I will get something that looks a bit like the help or man page for a screensaver. Also, it will complain about a -root flag. These error messages appear randomly. I removed my .xscreensaver file to see if that improved the situation, but it has not. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xscreensaver-base-4.18-19 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Allow screensaver to start, or access it thourgh the Screensaver Prefs box 2. 3. Actual Results: A blank screen, or (randomly) a blank screen with an Xscreensaver error message 1 Expected Results: Screensavers Additional info: I haven't seen the error come up in a while, but I'll write it down when I see it.
xscreensaver-base doesn't have any screensavers other than a screen blanker. xscreensaver-extras and -gl-extras have all of the various hacks. Unfortunately, one of the hacks from -extras is "ant", so xscreensaver-base picks up ant the java build tool from /usr/bin/ant, which of course has no idea what -root is or why you want it to make pretty pictures.
Is this still occurring?
Should be fixed in xscreensaver-4.21-2
Actually, this is still occurring with xscreensaver-4.21-4.. but only when xscreensaver-extras is not installed. Amusingly, this same bug has bitten the PostGreSQL folks, in reverse. They've had to teach their configure script not to try and build their Java sources using the xscreensaver ant module. Is Jamie still maintaining xscreensaver? Perhaps someone should drop him a note about this.. ;-)
Hi Jonathan, Yea, Jamie knows about this issue. It's still broken for you? What if you try th e latest rawhide package?
Doh, wish I had read your reply before emailing him. Now he'll think I'm lamerz. Anyway. I went ahead and installed the xscreensaver-extras-4.21-4 rpm on my Fedora Core 4 box, and that took care of the problem from my perspective. I suppose it's just inserting /usr/libexec/xscreensaver into PATH before my default PATH, and when the xscreensaver-extras aren't installed, it falls through to finding ant elsewhere. I actually have ant under /opt/bin, so a simple check to make sure the ant that is found isn't under /usr/bin wouldn't catch my case, if that's what you're doing?
Any clue where to actually get the 4.21-4 version? amin adatia amin
You can pick up the 4.21-4 rpms from the fedora 4 repository. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/ Has anyone thought about adding the extras and gl-extras packages to the normal fedora install (ie when I pick off workstation or something in anaconda) as a way to solve the confusion over this? If someone hadn't explained to me that the screensavers weren't in the xscreensaver-base package I wouldn't have sorted this out. (Which I guess is obvious since I started this report.)
They deliberately removed the screen savers to an extra package so that naive Fedora users wouldn't have some of the surprising/possibly offensive/non-functional screen savers being displayed.