I am using xscreensaver with a smart card. I checked "Authentication->Enable Smart Card Support" and chose "Lock" for Card Removal Action, but if xscreensaver is installed, it takes precedence over gnome-screensaver. We should probably check to see if gnome-screensaver is enabled as the default or else not offer that as a choice.
Ray, is there some easy and reliable way how to get this information whether gnome-screensaver will be in effect? I'm afraid there isn't because it is configurable per user but the authconfig setting is system-wide. IMO we could just check whether gnome-screensaver is/isn't installed looking for the /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver binary. But then xscreensaver probably at least shouldn't take precedence over gnome-screensaver when it is simply installed and user session configuration is not modified.
so we actually just do this: if ((ss_command = g_find_program_in_path ("gnome-screensaver"))) use_gscreensaver = TRUE; else { if (!(ss_command = g_find_program_in_path ("xscreensaver"))) return FALSE; } Which is probably backwards, since if the user installs xscreensaver they probably want to use it without having to uninstall gnome-screensaver, but anyway, the upshot is you can just test for its existance.
Just for curiousness is it possible to override the behaviour from comment #2 by user?
Nope.
Note this bug isn't really a big deal for RHEL5, because we don't ship xscreensaver in RHEL anymore.
Yeah, this is low priority/low severity for a reason. I probably should have reported it against rawhide.
Fixed in authconfig-5.3.15