Hi, does anyone have experience with the electric sheep screensaver? I for one have attempted a couple of times to get it going. Basically from what I gathered on the website for it, you just run in a terminal:
#electricsheep

and so I do that and it says "downloading sheep, please wait..." for about 20 or 30 seconds then MPlayer pops up. I don't see how MPlayer is a screen saver frontend in any way, although it does show me what I would expect it to look like. But anyhow, upon closing MPlayer, in the terminal it just says:

"[avi @ 0xebe080] max_analyze_duration reached
Terminated"

So frankly I am lost here as to otherwise actually getting it setup to start after (10 minutes,15 minutes,etc) like a normal screensaver.

Also, when I run the other command:
#electricsheep-preferences
it just says:
** (electricsheep-preferences:15098): WARNING **: The connection is closed
and nothing more.

Anyone got any ideas please? Also, I am running Ubuntu 12.04 if it matters, but I don't think so because several others distros I've used all do the same thing.

Any further assistance with this would be great!

Thanks.

Wow. Such an overwhelming response! Thanks!

Luckily I found the answer.

---------- Post added 06-14-12 at 07:12 PM ----------

Wow. Such an overwhelming response! Thanks!

Luckily I found the answer.

I have always started the Electric Sheep screen saver from xscreensaver-demo; I suspect that that is the more common experience.

So what did you find out (for the benefit of those who might come here later with the same question)?

Yes, it was the xscreensaver that is needed, plus you need the xscreensaver-gl packages. Ubuntu does not include those packages and the Gnome Screensaver daemon must be inhibited (or uninstalled) for it to work right. Basically, I just found this link: http://askubuntu.com/questions/61305...ver-wont-start.

I don't use gedit though but always nano but otherwise it seems straightforward and still relevant.

That makes sense. Thanks for filling in the blanks.

Unless someone had previous experience with xscreensaver, there is no way he or she could have conceivably figured that out alone.

Back when I used Ubuntu (it came factory-installed on two boxes I got from Dell back when Dell was making it easy to get Ubuntu), whenever I upgraded, Ubuntu removed xscreensaver and put gnome-screensaver in its place.

Then I would reboot and remove gnome-screensaver and re-install xscreensaver.

It became sort of a ritual.