I use Electric Sheep as screensaver on my netbook, and it's stunning! However, it uses some CPU power when running, so I only want to enable the screensaver when the AC is plugged in (or maybe rather, when the power profile is set to "Performance"); otherwise, the screensaver should either be disabled or set to "Blank".

The question is, is this possible with Powerdevil?

I thought that dbus might be the key here, but couldn't figure out how to manipulate the screensaver options.

At this time Powerdevil does not support different screen saver selections. This would definitely be a nice idea though, you might want to file a feature request.

In the interim, if you can figure out how to change the screensaver from a script, then you can probably get Powerdevil to do it that way.

I could make a script that runs

Code: Select all

qdbus org.kde.krunner /ScreenSaver SimulateUserActivity

every x seconds, but that feels a little bit hackish. There's also another problem I didn't think of yesterday: I want to lock my screen after y minutes, but then my screensaver is automatically started I think.

So yeah, the best workaround would probably to change the screensaver somehow.

I'll file a bug on Monday, when my exam is over. Got to get away from the computer if I want to get any study done...

Instead of doing a research on how dbus works, I used the easy (and hackish) way:

1. Make two copies of ~/.kde4/share/config/kscreensaverrc. (I added the prefix _powersave and _performance).
2. Modify one to change the screensaver to kblank.desktop (or change other options if you want to).
3. Make two scripts to copy kscreensaverrc_[powersafe/performance] to kscreensaverrc.
4. Make the scrips executable and set Powerdevil to execute respective script a specific power profile is activated.

Of course there are better ways to do this, but since no one's has told me how, this is my temporary solution.