Is there any way to run an application as a screensaver in Linux

Question

I want to run a full-screen application as a screen saver. Is it possible in Linux? It seems that XScreenSaver is not capable of doing this and GnomeScreenSaver has this in their wish list.

Answer 1

An (untested) trick that might work would be to run your program under Xnest.

something like this pseudo shellcode may work:

#get root window id
RWINID=$(xwininfo -root |sed -n -e 's/.*Window.*id: \(0x[a-f0-9]\+\).*/\1/p')
#start Xnest on the root window
Xnest -parent $RWINID :5
DISPLAY=":5" myapp