[CentOS] XScreenSaver

Nicolas Kovacs
Sun, 08 Apr 2018 11:54:33 -0000

Hi,

I'm currently moving all our local school's desktop clients from
Slackware 14.1 to CentOS 7 + Xfce. Right now I'm fine-tuning the default
user profile.

I have a problem with XScreenSaver. The application per se works very
well. Only there's a hard-coded pop-up window that reminds the user that
he's not running the latest version. So, if I'm running version 5.36 as
provided by the EPEL repo and not the latest and greatest 5.38 as
provided upstream, I get a pestering pop-up window informing me that
YOUR VERSION OF XSCREENSAVER IS VERY OLD. This functionality is
apparently hard-coded, since there's no way to deactivating it.

The Slackware distribution seems to have solved the problem by promising
upstream to keep things up-to-date.

For the moment I simply work without it, because I'm annoyed by my users
phoning me and asking me what's this thing with their screensaver being
too old.

As far as I can tell, there would be several solutions to this problem.

1. Ask the EPEL maintainers to keep the application up-to-date.

2. Patch the darn thing so I don't get the annoying popup.

3. Maintain my own up-to-date version of XScreenSaver in my private repo.

Any thoughts about this?

Cheers,

Niki