Getting fancylogin and cmatrix together ...
Kousik Nandy
Story
So I was getting bored one day,
debugging debugging debugging, so decided to talk to one of my pet, a
simple-minded old P-III with pretty little amount of RAM (so it doesn't
run X). She's running on SuSE 9.0, and the console login prompt looked
so boring (it just dumps /etc/issue
and puts a login prompt). She told me, hey I also want to have a login
screen like the next door girl! So beautiful aren't they? And if
you do not attend to
them, they run cool demos! Well, I told her, they born rich in RAM, and
therefore they run kdm, gdm or xdm. But don't get disheartened, let me
see what I can do for you.
My initial intention was to inject a
screensaver in the vanilla login
code, then I bumped into fancylogin. So there is already a facility to
provide dialogue box etc (with a penguin face) for logging in. Good,
it'll serve my purpose of a jazzy login prompt. I was already familiar
with cmatrix, a matrix demo emulator on the console. So I decided to
get them married, and their combined avatar is cmatrixlogin; which is
essentially fancylogin, that runs cmatrix as a screensaver after 1
minute of inactivity. Though it is not too tied with cmatrix, any
program that writes on console (like a script that keeps executing fortune, or scrolls stock
quotes) and exits on a keystroke will serve the purpose as well.
She's happier now!
Documentation
- Download cmatrix,
compile the source and install (or, install the binary distribution).
- usual steps for source installation, tar zxvf, configure, make, make
install (for more accurate steps, check cmatrix's documentation)
- Download fancylogin
source
code.
- unzip/tar the source code in a temporary directory (typically
/tmp/fancylogin-0.99.7) of your choosing.
- tar zxvf
fancylogin-0.99.7.tar.gz
- Download cmatrixlogin patch.
- bunzip the patch, move it to the directory containing
fancylogin source.
- bunzip2
fancylogin-0.99.7.screensaver.patch.bz2
- mv
fancylogin-0.99.7.screensaver.patch /tmp/fancylogin-0.99.7
- Apply the patch
- cd
/tmp/fancylogin-0.99.7
- patch -Np1 <
fancylogin-0.99.7.screensaver.patch
- Compile fancylogin, and install as instructed.
- Edit /etc/fancyloginrc
and uncomment the line which specifies the screensaver. Make sure the path
to the screensaver program (cmatrix in this case) is correct.
- Next time your machine is restarted, you'll get fancylogin in
your console, with a cool screensaver coming active after 1 minute of
inactivity.
Download
The current version of fancylogin
is 0.99.7,
I have written a patch on it, which you can download.
If the patch is officially adopted in fancylogin, I won't have to
distribute patches like this :-)
Screenshot
fancylogin screen
(because of terminal type mismatch, it looks weird in xterm, but looks
much better in console).
when fancylogin timed out, the screen is running cmatrix as a screensaver (gets
deactivated when a key is hit).
License
The code is released under GNU General Public
Licese.
cmatrixlogin, runs a screensaver on fancylogin
Copyright © 2004 Kousik Nandy <kousik () indiatimes . com>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
USA.