Last week, we had visitors at work who had done a Linux related job for us and were ready to demo their product. One of the consultants had a nice screensaver running on his Debian-powered laptop (or was it Ubuntu… I don’t remember). He told me it was called “busy spheres” but it took me a while to find out that that is nowadays part of the GLX port of the “Really Slick Screensavers” collection.
Busy Spheres
I liked it enough that I created a Slackware package for it…. http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/rss-glx/ After installation, the screensaver collection will be available for selection both in XScreenSaver and KDE screensaver (KDE will show some of them twice, since some of the RSS are already incorporated in the kdeartwork package).
The list of screensavers contained in the package is quite large: biof, busyspheres, colorfire, cyclone, drempels, euphoria, feedback, fieldlines, flocks, flux, helios, hufo_smoke, hufo_tunnel, hyperspace, lattice, lorenz, matrixview, pixelcity, plasma, skyrocket,solarwinds, spirographx and sundancer2 .
By the way, I noticed that Really Slick Screensavers has another recent addition which is not available yet in the Linux port – MicroCosm – which looks really slick (pun intended). Let’s hope rss-glx gets updated soon.
Eric
I never used screensavers, but i think it’s cool 🙂
I think, like 12 years ago I used to sit for hours behind a monitor at night, running the VoodooLights screensaver (in Windows)… hoping that the hypnotizing movements would put my baby son to sleep when he was suffering from belly ache. Either that, or I would be stuck with a crying baby all night.
That is not really where my interest for screensavers originated – much earlier I created a series of fractal screensavers (also in Windows) for a company where I worked as a systems administrator – to avoid having to remove all kinds of illegal screensavers. The “flying toasters” was notorious for being all over the place.
There’s at least one fractal algorhithm I used at the time, which I have not yet seen in the large collection of XScreenSaver hacks… perhaps I should write one.
Eric
cool!
Outstanding! Thanks, Eric! 🙂
~Eric, the Nocturnal Slacker
Cool stuff. Thx again for your creativity!
Nothing beats tuning up the desktop eyecandy when I am too tired to do anuthing else.
Lovely staff, I came, I downloaded, I installed and I loved them.
Thanks