A Wayland screensaver

Now that screen locking is done in Wayland demos, it is time to go for the eye-candy: full-screen idle animations, also known as screensavers. The first step was to port an existing screensaver to Wayland. I chose glmatrix from XScreenSaver, because it is cool, and it renders with OpenGL. This way I did not have to port Xlib based rendering to Cairo (yay!).

Here is GLMatrix running as a regular, windowed application on Wayland, using the toytoolkit:

GLMatrix on the Wayland demo compositor.

On Wayland, screensavers can be reduced to pure animation applications, while the compositor handles everything about locking. Next, we need a Wayland protocol extension to actually use this idle-animation in a screensaver'y way.

GLMatrix is already in the Wayland demo repository as a client called wscreensaver, and it requires cairo-gl, just like gears does.