mouse movement wakes screensaver

[Tero Karvinen]

Minor mouse movement (tram passing by, walking around) stops gnome-screensaver.

With an optical mouse on an uneven surface, it is sometimes difficult to click an icon to throttle gnome-screensaver without immidiately stoping screensaver again. Disabling screensaver is very annoying if sleeping or doing non-computer work near a desktop computer.

Suggestions:
- Add option to ignore mouse movement events
- Add a cli command to immidiatly go to the deepest DPMS sleep, only waking from keyboard input

Tested on gnome-screensaver and Dapper Flight.

Same problem with xscreensaver #34854.

[Simon Law (sfllaw)]

One way to fix this is to ignore small mouse movements. I believe xscreensaver does this.

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

In .xscreensaverrc, pointerHysteresis controls this. However, there is undocumented (too low) maximum. See also bug #34854.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

since gnome-screensaver uses gconf and isnt able to use .xscreensaverrc, re-tagging it as whishlist (there is no such setting yet in gnome-screensaver)

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

This is a genuine issue where gnome-screensaver doesn't do the right thing, not a feature request. It should be forwarded upstream.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

forwared upstream:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359589

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

comment by upstream:
"We ignore movements less than 50 pixels. So, I don't understand why walking by
should deactivate the screensavers. If the reporter is talking about DPMS
itself and not the screensaver window then that's another story. Currently,
DPMS policy is handled within the X Server. I don't know of any way to tell it
to ignore events. Is that what the reporter is talking about?"

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

this has been fixed upstream since November, and the fix is already in feisty. The 50 pixel treshold has been changed to 10% of the screen width.