Thursday, August 23, 2007

Disabling Gnome screensaver thru the terminal

Today, I had a interesting problem where I needed to disable the Gnome Screensaver remotely via the terminal.

Normally it's a trivial task to disable a screensaver via the graphical interface but I never had to do this remotely.

However, I figured I needed to use the gconftool-2 Gnome configuration editor tool, and found this thread that lead me in the right direction.

With this command you can see the current status of Gnome Screensaver.

gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled

- false means screensaver is disabled
- true means screensaver is enabled.

Change the configuration with this command

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled "option"

Insert your options as shown, and again

- false means screensaver is disabled
- true means screensaver is enabled.