Minor mouse movement stops screensaver

[Tero Karvinen]

Minor mouse movement (tram passing by, walking around) stops xscreensaver.

With an optical mouse on an uneven surface, it is sometimes difficult to click an icon to "xscreensaver-command -throttle" 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 events
- Add a cli command to immidiatly go to the deepest DPMS sleep, only waking from keyboard input

Maybe some of these should be done in gnome-screensaver, if that's the future default.

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

In 'man xscreensaver':
 pointerHysteresis (class Integer)
  If the mouse moves less than this-many pixels in a second, ignore
  it (do not consider that to be "activity.") This is so that the screen
  doesn’t un-blank (or fail to blank) just because you
  bumped the desk. Default: 10 pixels.

However, changing ~/.xscreensaver
  pointerHysteresis: 750
then restarting xscreensaver
$ killall xscreensaver ; xscreensaver &
does not seem to affect.

On Breezy, 'apt-get source xscreensaver':
xscreensaver-4.21/driver/prefs.c 1605:
if (p->pointer_hysteresis > 100) p->pointer_hysteresis = 100;

This limitation is not mentioned on manpage.

I think the maximum of pointer_hysteresis should be changed to 2000, so that mouse events could be ignored. That would also make xscreensaver behave like described on manpage.

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

Reported upstream to jwz a jwz.org according to instructions on
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/bugs.html

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Thanks for the report and investigation, and especially for forwarding it upstream.

Did you get any feedback from jwz? If not, we can make a Debian or Ubuntu patch for it.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Is this still an issue in Ubuntu 8.04? Did you hear from jwz?

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

[Peter Parkkali (peter-parkkali)]

I took the liberty of reopening this and reassigning it to gnome-screensaver, since that's the default screensaver for 8.04, and same exact problem affects it. (For example, just having an optical mouse on a lacquered birch table, seemingly without any movement, can cause enough static to be registered as motion).

Looking briefly at gs-prefs.c and gs-watcher-x11.c in the source, there doesn't seem to be any hysteresis detection or options to ignore cursor movement completely.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for your report, this is something that needs to be send upstream to bugzilla.gnome.org, for forwarding instructions please have a look to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME; thanks.

[Peter Parkkali (peter-parkkali)]

Looking more closely, it seems this bug has a duplicate at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/37139 which was already reported upstream; they consider it fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359589

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

still an issue? if so the upstream bug needs to be reopened.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

This is fixed now, if it is not for you with Oneiric, please file a new report, thanks.