A *simple* recipe for enabling screen locking?

bogusman · 2009-02-19 17:30:40

I like the small footprint of XFCE but I just can't continue using it until I figure out a way to enable screen locking. I've looked for days now to find a *simple* way to do that: installing gnome-screensaver, etc, but it simply doesn't work.

Could someone point me to a simple mechanism for making this happen?

Thanks!

Bo

Pindakoe · 2009-02-19 17:51:42

There is a panel action which allows you to do just that (and log out). It is called action buttons on my install and I believe it comes withe xfce-session.

bogusman · 2009-02-19 18:40:08

Thanks for the quick reply.

I saw that panel action but it does nothing at all. I'm very puzzled by that. I even saw that there's supposed to be a panel addon at http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins that does the same thing but there's nothing there that I can find. There's no timeout configuration either that I can find.

This is such a simple thing that I'm having *very* hard time understanding why it doesn't work. I'm either missing something incredibly obvious or there's a fundamental problem with my install.

It may be worth pointing out (and perhaps posting on another forum) that I've installed xfce via yum on a CentOS 5 appliance from Groundwork (a Nagios based network monitor.) The default interface for that is twm, and it's just not usable, hence the desire (need?) for xfce. There are apparently issues with installing GNOME on top of Groundwork or I'd pursue that as an alternative, although the small footprint of xfce is seductively appealing.

Bo

Xubuwal · 2009-02-19 19:56:11

Ctrl-Alt-Delete locks the screen!

greetings

bogusman · 2009-02-19 22:32:10

That doesn't work either - it's running in a VM sad

It's all the more problematic since the normal means of connecting to the VM is with VNC. Ctl-Alt-Del is ignored. The only other option is to log out. That terminates the VNC session which cannot be started again w/o logging on via SSH and restarting the vncserver.

As I said, I've tried nearly everything that I've seen and it is simply broken. It would be *wonderful* if there were documentation on how to make it work (there's not that I've found) or some guru who can give some direction.

Bo

herd · 2009-02-20 00:49:56

What would I do is:
Applications/Settings Manager/Keyboard/Shortcuts
create a shortcut for xflock4
keycode to your liking, e.g. Win+lowercase L

xflock4 supports xscreensaver, gnome-screensaver and falls back to xlock if no screensaver daemon is running.
Indeed, if you don't like the burden of a screensaver daemon on your appliance, ditch xflock4 and call e.g. "xlock -mode clock" from above directly.

hth,

herd

PS: I think you should "deamonize" your vnc-server.

bogusman · 2009-02-20 22:03:31

Herd,

I haven't yet had a chance to test the first part of your suggestion, but I did implement your PS on my machines at home last night and I like it, a lot. While not a complete solution to my problem, it's a big improvement.

Hopefully I can check the other sometime today.

Thanks!

Bo

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#1 2009-02-19 17:30:40