For Compiz Users

An embedded screensaver is light on memory usage, but won’t play nice with Compiz Fusion.

gconftool‐2 ‐‐type bool ‐‐set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix ‐root

If you don’t like the Matrix look, you can substitute any listed screensaver instead of “glmatrix.”

For Compiz Fusion Users:

XWinWrap is not available in the Ubuntu repositories. I installed it with this DEB package from Treviño’s Ubuntu Repository.

Double‐click on the downloaded package to open the package installer. Click install to install XWinWrap. Now press Alt‐F2, or open a terminal, to enter this command: (Careful, it may be running off the page a bit.)

xwinwrap ‐ni ‐argb ‐fs ‐s ‐st ‐sp ‐nf ‐b ‐‐ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix ‐window‐id WID

Your desktop should be taken over by glMatrix, the screensaver effect that I used in the video. Unfortunately, it is not possible to have desktop icons over the animation. After the double dash, you should be able to run any program you want to use as your background. Screensavers work well. Look in /usr/lib/xscreensaver for a ton of screensavers you can use. Here are a few of them I tried:

Tunnel:

xwinwrap ‐ni ‐argb ‐fs ‐s ‐st ‐sp ‐nf ‐b ‐‐ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/atunnel ‐window‐id WID

Toasters:

xwinwrap ‐ni ‐argb ‐fs ‐s ‐st ‐sp ‐nf ‐b ‐‐ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/flyingtoasters ‐window‐id WID

Plasma (my eyes!):

xwinwrap ‐ni ‐argb ‐fs ‐s ‐st ‐sp ‐nf ‐b ‐‐ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/plasma ‐window‐id WID

I have a Intel Core 2 Quad and an Nvidia Geforce 8600GT, some of the screensavers ran better than others but most had no noticeable impact on Compiz’s performance.

If you run into trouble, kill the screensaver application. Switch to a terminal with Ctrl‐Alt‐F1 and use killall programname, and then switch back to X with Ctrl‐Alt‐F7.

Alternative Source

Nautilus draws the desktop (including the icons) for you in Gnome by default. You have to tell it to stop doing that, so we can do the matrix animation in its place. Nautilus can be configured using gconf.

gconftool‐2 ‐‐type bool ‐‐set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

Now that you have the desktop to ourselves, ask xscreensaver ‘glmatrix’ to start drawing itself in the desktop window (’root’ window).

/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix ‐root

If you want the animation every time you log in, open “~/.config/autostart/glmatrix.desktop” in your text editor and paste the following:

[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Encoding=UTF‐8 Name=No name Name[en_IN]=Desktop matrix Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix ‐root X‐GNOME‐Autostart‐enabled=true

If you are fed up with playing around and want your old desktop back, use this line in the terminal:

gconftool‐2 ‐‐type bool ‐‐set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop true && nautilus