Screensaver and display preferences

This page explains how to alter screensaver and display preferences in order to save energy or increase security.

DICE Linux has a screensaver that starts (by default) after five minutes. You can change that to a different period of time using the screensaver preferences. Adjust the "Blank after" and "Lock Screen After" buttons as needed.

If you are using the standard MATE desktop environment, you can find the screensaver preferences panel by choosing the Control Centre option from the main Menu (top-left corner) and then selecting the Internet and network group.

In Gnome enter the main Applications menu (top-left corner) and search for screensaver. See also the Screen Lock in GNOME page for more details.

If you cannot unlock the screen

If you use a non-English keyboard layout with your desktop environment (e.g. Cyrillic), or if you have a non-British keyboard on your laptop, you may find yourself unable to unlock the screen. You can test to see if this is happening to you:

• Login to a DICE session
• Lock the screen
• Click to make the xscreensaver box appear
• Type some characters into the "Username" field. Are these the characters you expected to see? If not, you may have trouble typing in your password.

There are two ways to solve this problem.

Firstly, you could change your password. Instead of having a password containing things like punctuation characters and characters not used in English, try a password which is simply several random English words. That's just as secure, as long as the words are truly random. For instance, open a dictionary and choose four words at random (for example, "cereal jambo top boomerang". Please don't use this example!). That would be a perfectly secure password, and it should not give you any problem unlocking your session.

Secondly, an Informatics user has provided this Perl script which might fix the problem. The idea is to call the setxkbmap tool with some arguments to switch the keyboard layout every time when the process xscreensaver-command -watch tells us that Xscreensaver is locking the screen (and possibly switches the layout back on unlock).

To use this script create a directory within your DICE home directory named .startup, save the script as something like xscreensaver-reset-kbd-us.pl and then finally ensure it is executable.

mkdir ~/.startup
cp ~/Downloads/control_xscreensaver_layout.pl_.txt ~/.startup/xscreensaver-reset-kbd-us.pl
chmod a+x ~/.startup/xscreensaver-reset-kbd-us.pl

The script should start working the next time you logout and login again. We have not tested this with Ubuntu, but it looks reasonable to us.