[Lazarus] "Defeating" a screen saver

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Henry Vermaak wrote:
> On 25/09/12 11:01, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> I appreciate that there might be no guaranteed portable answer to this
>> one, and FWIW I'm primarily interested in the Linux+X+KDE combination.
>>
>> If a program knows that something's going on that it might later need to
>> tell the user about, e.g. that there's serial comms going on in the
>> background even if the GUI's not being updated, is it possible to do
>> anything that the LCL and lower levels will interpret similarly to
>> keyboard and mouse activity in order to prevent a screen saver from
>> kicking in?
> 
> xdg-screensaver is a script that you can use to control the screensaver
> (seems to support all the ones I know).  It's in the xdg-utils package
> on my system.  I don't know of a nicer way to do this and cover all the
> bases, except to use dbus with org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, most desktop
> environments should work with that, I think.

I try to use the xdg utilities when I can, and pursuing Graeme's 
suggestion of looking at the VLC sources I see they use it which has to 
be a recommendation.

I'll see what I can work in, but particularly allowing that 
xdg-screensaver can take several seconds to run it's more suited to 
being run at the start and end of a program session than "on the fly" 
when data is seen coming through. The only alternative I can see is 
doing something at the kernel level to push a keyboard or mouse event 
through to X.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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