Re: run arbitrary program as screensaver?
Hm, it seemed to me seti was slowing down my weathered 486 even when niced
to the hilt. Guess I was wrong. Thanks for the tip.
Xscreensaver, nota bene, seems to do what I want, barring unforeseen
events like compiling a kernel while having a coffee. Ah well
chris
On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Joey Hess wrote:
> Krzys Majewski wrote:
> > I did that a few months ago, but it did not come with a screen-saver
> > option. What I did now is download the xseti tarball and the
> > xscreensaver package, together they do the job (although they do more
> > than what I wanted, which is just to have setiathome run in the bg
> > when the screen blank). Two other options I researched are:
> > - a script which looks in /proc/loadavg and starts/stops setiathome
> > when the 5-/1-minute load average is low/high
> > - a script which looks in /proc/interrupts and starts setiathome when
> > the kbd and mouse interrupt values haven't changed for a while,
> > then stops it as soon as they do.
>
> It seems to me you don't understand how unix handles niced processes. (I
> assume that setiathome defaults to running niced, like other distributed
> processing clients such as the distributed.net client. Even if it
> doesn't, you can renice it.)
>
> Processes on a unix system have scheduling priorities. If a background
> process is running "niced", it typically has a nice value from 10 to 19.
> Normal processes have a nice value of 0. Extremely high priority processes
> have a negative nice value. You can see a processes's nice value by running
> top (the NI field).
>
> The higher the nice value, the less likely a program is to get some cpu
> time. The basic effect is that if a daemon runs niced in the background,
> it will not get any cpu time, ever, unless the cpu is otherwise idle. Any
> other process will preemt it. So you can run things like setiathome at all
> times, without any slowdown on your machine.
>
> For more information, see the nice(1) and renice(8) man pages.
>
> --
> see shy jo
>
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