Skinning the screensaver

[Vincent]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 10:47:12AM +0200, Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér
> wrote:
> > Has it ever been discussed to make an addition to Xscreensaver with a
> > better looking unlock dialog? I find that Xfce is very polished and
> > really love looking at it, but when it drops to Xscreensaver, it uses
> > the default X.org unlock dialog, which is... less than pretty.
> > But I don't know if this is a minor or a major task.
>
> It's a good idea. Maybe you should propose it to xscreensaver devs?
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Yves-Alexis
> _______________________
>

The Xscreensaver recently did an article on this. Basically, it came down to
"I can't use a toolkit because that's too large and thus is bound to have
bugs. You can't have potential security bugs here because it'd allow you to
bypass the screen lock, so I wrote my own, concise toolkit just for the
unlock dialog of which I'm quite sure it is secure." He also pointed out
that the preferences dialog is GTK.

See http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html

Also note that:


>    Making the xscreensaver unlock dialog securely use a toolkit is
>    difficult, but possible, were a knowledgeable person to do the work. If the
>    work were done well (by which I mean: clearly commented and documented, and
>    with obvious attention paid to the security implications) I would be happy
>    to incorporate those changes into the xscreensaver distribution.
>
>    Making the unlock dialog also be able to take advantage of
>    accessibility tools is probably a *lot* harder. I don't know how much
>    harder, because I'm not an accessibility expert. But anyone intending to
>    implement that had better be both an expert on accessibility, and well
>    versed in secure X11 programming, because the security implications of
>    getting it wrong would be dire indeed.
>
> Cheers,
-- 
Vincent
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