[comp.windows.x] Screen lock in awm

brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks) (12/04/89)

The screen lock function in awm burns cpu doing the pretty fractal
display.  On a single user workstation with nothing better to do
this is fine, but on a large multi user system it is very wasteful.
Has anyone taken the fractal display out and put in a simple xdm
style "Screen locked by USER" gizmo.  As I recall this is the way
these things used to work.  Can the code from XDM be simply picked
up and used in the lock function?
brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp

D. Allen [CGL]) (12/06/89)

In article <40367@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks) writes:
>The screen lock function in awm burns cpu doing the pretty fractal
>display.  On a single user workstation with nothing better to do
>this is fine, but on a large multi user system it is very wasteful.
>Has anyone taken the fractal display out and put in a simple xdm
>style "Screen locked by USER" gizmo.  As I recall this is the way
>these things used to work.  Can the code from XDM be simply picked
>up and used in the lock function?

On some unix systems, since awm doesn't fork to run the fractals, it
causes awm to get reniced down to +4 by the system for using too much
cpu.  Anything you spawn from awm after that inherits the nice.  It's not
hard to make awm fork, exec, and wait for, say, an "xlock" program.  You
can write one and rewrite it then without having to modify awm at all,
and nobody pays a cpu penalty when the xlock finishes.
-- 
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) idallen@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca idallen@watcgl.waterloo.edu
 129.97.128.64    Computer Graphics Lab/University of Waterloo/Ontario/Canada