HOWTO: Inhibit Gnome-Screensaver when Flash is fullscreen in Gnome 3

[mikeym]

Hi,

This is a quick script I wrote to inhibit gnome-screensaver when Flash is in fullscreen. I had to write it because I realised that existing scripts to inhibit the screensaver from gnome 2 no longer worked and in fact it was impossible to convert them (I tried) to gnome 3 as they were written in Bash.

Anyway, put the following in $HOME/bin/flash-screensaver-inhibitor.py

#!/usr/bin/python -u
# #######################################
#
# Inhibit Screensaver in Flash in Gnome 3
# By mikey
# Contact abc.mikey (at) googlemail.com
#
#########################################
# NOTE the -u switch in the hashbang that 
#      turns on unbuffered stdout for 
#      debuging

from Xlib.display import Display
from Xlib import X, error
from time import sleep
import dbus

# Check we are still connected, by sending NoOp to X
def X_session_connected(display):
  try:
    display.no_operation()
    display.sync()
  except error.ConnectionClosedError:
    return False
  return True


bus = dbus.SessionBus()
proxy = bus.get_object ('org.gnome.SessionManager', '/org/gnome/SessionManager')
sessionManager = dbus.Interface (proxy, 'org.gnome.SessionManager')
cookie = 0
display = Display()
root = display.screen().root
count = 0

while X_session_connected(display):
  count += 1
  # Poll approx once every minute; 30 * 2 seconds
  if count == 30:
    count = 0
    ret = root.get_full_property(display.intern_atom('_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW'), X.AnyPropertyType)
    if ret is not None:
      windowID = ret.value[0]
      if windowID != 0:
        window = display.create_resource_object('window', windowID)
        title = window.get_wm_name()
        winclass = window.get_wm_class()
        print 'Active Window: ', title, ' ; ', winclass
        if title == 'exe' and 'Exe' in winclass:
          if cookie == 0:
            print 'Inhibiting Gnome Screensaver'
            cookie = sessionManager.Inhibit ("flash-screensaver-inhibitor.py", 0, "Flash fullscreen override", 8)
        else:
          if cookie != 0:
            print 'Uninhibiting Gnome Screensaver'
            sessionManager.Uninhibit(cookie)
            cookie = 0
      else:
        print 'Root window active'
  sleep(2)



# NOTE usefull command to show if screensaver is inhibited:
#
# dbus-send --session --dest=org.gnome.SessionManager --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=20000 /org/gnome/SessionManager org.gnome.SessionManager.IsInhibited uint32:8
#

And make it executable with chmod +x $HOME/bin/flash-screensaver-inhibitor.py

And copy the following into $HOME/.config/autostart/flash-screensaver-inhibitor.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=sh -c "$HOME/bin/flash-screensaver-inhibitor.py &> /dev/null"
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=Flash Screensaver Inhibitor
Name=Flash Screensaver Inhibitor
Comment[en_US]=Inhibit screensaver when viewing Flash
Comment=Inhibit screensaver when viewing Flash

You can then disable it later if you like using the Startup Applications dialogue: gnome-session-properties

If you need to debug for any reason, try changing /dev/null to a desired log file from gnome-session-properties

That's it!

Fix: Fixed a stupid mistake that allowed the screensaver to still activate. Now inhibits properly.

[jazzer]

Thank you for this script!

I know there exists a couple different extensions for gnome3 that will do this, but I feel this should be done automatically wherever it can be done.

One thing I will note your line:

if title == 'exe' and 'Exe' in winclass:

I had to replace it with this to get it to work,

if title == 'plugin-container' and 'plugin-container' in winclass:

This was the only way it would inhibit the blanking of the screen using Firefox 14. The only other thing I am going to try and debug is that it seems to stop running on it's own. I haven't yet spent the time to find the problem. I will update this when I find the solution.

Many thanks!

[jazzer]

Ok. All I can say is it's failing on an unhandled exception. I haven't had time to debug it any further and don't really remember python well enough to figure out more.

I've gone back (for now) of using an extension in gnome3 to inhibit the blanking of the screen.