I understand this is a somewhat ancient thread, but since I happened to be searching this very same information myself today, and this forum thread came up fairly high in my search results, I thought I'd go ahead and share what I'd found in case it helps anyone else searching for this information.
Hi All,
Following this thread as well as the others on this subject, I'm still not clear on
1) Can the kde screensaver be disabled?
2) Can the xscreensaver be used instead?
What are the "HOW TO" for either question?
Thanks.
Bob
The answer to Bob's question is contained in the xscreensaver manual under the section heading "USING KDE" (right below the section titled "USING GNOME" just a couple of pages from the top) and can be read by typing "man xscreensaver" in a terminal (console) window. The exact same manual page can also be found at
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html for those folks who would prefer to just click a link.
manually starting screensaver via commandline in KDE4
Is there a way to do this in KDE 4?
In answer to the above question posed by buchs, there are actually a couple ways that I personally know of to do this in KDE4, and there may be more ways than I know as well.
The first way I know of and probably the most reliable if your distro has the "XDG" tools installed is using the "xdg-screensaver lock" command, but even if this command is not available on your system, then there is still a method available similar to the dcop methods described here. The only major difference is that the new system is now dbus instead of dcop, and the tool for sending the commands is called "qdbus". (There is also a graphical dbus browser called "qdbusviewer" which can be used to browse the available dbus channels similarly to the kdcop program used in KDE3.)
Hopefully this information helps someone.