Well, I've switched to KDE now

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On 05/05/2011 04:23 AM, David L wrote:
> Since gnome shell wasn't working well for me, I've
> switched to KDE.  I'm trying to get back some of
> the functionality I was using in gnome2.  One thing
> I do is query the screensaver in a cron job to log
> my consulting hours.  So I figured I'd attempt to use
> a portable way of doing that, so I tried:
> 
> xdg-screensaver status
> 
> which I thought was supposed to be a desktop
> agnostic way of checking the screensaver.  But
> I got this error:
> 
> Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name
> org.gnome.ScreenSaver was not provided by any .service files disabled
> 
> So how do I make that work and why am I still
> getting gnome errors when I'm using KDE?

It appears you may have found a bug in the xdg-screensaver shell script.

You may like to report this in bugzilla.redhat.com.

I'd never come across the command before (so thanks for the pointer!) but at a
quick glance it appears that detectDE() may either be getting things wrong and
thinking you are running gnome when you are not or else an unguarded call of
dbus-send it spewing the above to the terminal when it shouldn't (I think that
this output is coming from the screensaver_gnome_screensaver() function but I
don't have a KDE install to try to reproduce with right now and I don't have the
time at the moment to try to trace the script by hand).

Running it with "sh -x $(which xdg-screensaver)" status should show you exactly
where things are going south.

Regards,
Bryn.