From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: When I change the screensaver timeout (in gnome, from Start Here->Preferences->Screensaver), the screensaver keeps appearing after the previous timeout until I kill and restart xscreensaver. This happens every time I reduce the timeout but apparently just a few times when I increase it. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Starting with a timeout of 10 minutes 2. Go to Start Here->Preferences->Screensaver 3. Change the screensaver timeout to 1 minute 4. Wait Actual Results: The screensaver does not start after 1 minute of inactivity (but it does after 10 minutes - the previous timeout). Expected Results: The screensaver should start after 1 minute.
I tried to restart xscreensaver via "xscreensaver-command -restart" and it sometimes gives a "xscreensaver window unexpectedly deleted" error. Can this be related?
The xscreensaver daemon reloads the .xscreensaver file when it notices that it has changed, but it only checks the file the next time it would have woken up to do something -- so if it's asleep for ten minutes waiting for you to become idle, it won't notice your new preference setting for ten minutes. Rather than restarting xscreensaver, you can just click the "Preview" button in xscreensaver-demo -- that will cause the daemon to wake up (to run a saver in full-screen mode) and it will pick up your new timeouts right away.
Hmmmm... I had already forgotten about this :). Thanks for the info.