This post gives you answer for 2 questions.
1. Screen lock in awesome window manager ?
2. Screensaver in awesome window manager ?
By default awesome window manager doesn’t provide any inbuilt support for locking the screen or screen saver. It can be achieved with any one of the following standalone apps and small modification to rc.lua.
1. slock – http://tools.suckless.org/slock
2. xscreensaver
3. xtrlock
In this article I will demonstrate how to use xscreensaver with awesome to lock your screen. The steps for other tools should be almost same with very few small modification.
Installing xscreensaver. For Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install xscreensaver
Editing the rc.lua
Add the following lines In your rc.lua file under “Standard program” section.
-- Standard program
awful.key({ }, "F12", function () awful.util.spawn("xscreensaver-command -lock") end),
In the above code “F12″ is our short cut key, and “xscreensaver-command -lock” is the command to be executed when the key is pressed. I our case it should start the screen saver and lock the screen.
At the end of rc.lua file add the following lines to start the xscreensaver application, here -no-splash switch says not to show splash screen when starting xscreensaver.
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("xscreensaver -no-splash")
Now restart awesome window manager.
Testing
Open a command and use the below command to make suer the xscreensaver application is started by awesome.
$ ps -ef | grep xscreensaver mohamed 2984 1 0 17:06 ? 00:00:00 xscreensaver -no-splash mohamed 3857 3796 0 18:19 pts/4 00:00:00 grep --color=auto xscreensaver
From the above we can see the xscreensaver is running as intended.
Now press “F12” key in you keyboard, xscreensaver application should lock your screen. If you do any mouse or keyboard activity It will prompt you for password.
That’s it. done!. Leave you comment.
