Matrix and SFD

SOURCE : http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/glmatrix.jpg

It was three or four years back when I first saw this MAGIC at an  event organized to celebrate Software Freedom Day at Olcut College, Galle. This MAGIC was to put the glmatrix screensaver as the background of gnome desktop. It was Anuradha Rathnaweera on stage demonstrating the power of linux. I was in the audience still schooling at that time. Science then I want to give it a try, I tried several times and failed.

Last night, a few hours before the SFD 2010 (in local time) I thought to give it a try. With little browsing I was able to do that MAGIC. Here is how to do it,

1) Install xscreensaver
In Fedora
yum install xscreensaver
In Ubuntu
apt-get install xscreensaver

2) Disable show desktop in nautilus
gconftool-2 --set --type b /app/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

3) Put glmatrix as background in gnome desktop

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root

(the path to glmatrix may depend on the distro, above works fine for Fedora 13)

Enjoy !