CentOS 7 - xscreensaver

I really hate this Gnome interface - badly.  It requires so much clicky-clacky/mouse-moving work that I instantly feel like I'm in Microsoft Windows again.  I prefer a nice, simple Window Manager that is simply that - a window manager.

I have a laptop that I have installed CentOS 7 to - after completely forgetting with a desktop installation - that doesn't have a viable screen saver (unless I choose to go with that abomination called "Gnome").  See, I can't deal with Gnome.  I tried KDE for a week, and half of the time, I couldn't unlock the KDE/plasma screen because it never presented the unlock on it.  I realized that CentOS was not going to make a good desktop/laptop operating system unless I could get to a decent Window Manager and screen saver.

So, I did what every intelligent, awesome, amazing, and brilliant individual would do.  I went down the rabbit hole.  Seriously, I should have taken the blue pill and pretended that Gnome was just awesome - but I don't think I could get beyond comparing it to slicing my wrists and doing pushups in salt water with a hint of lemon juice in it.  I grabbed Xfce (nice - this one came in packages from the Fedora Project epel repository).  However, the EPEL Fedora Project repository still did not have xscreensaver.  That's a serious risk to me.  The last thing I wanted was someone coming by, finding the laptop unlocked, and me returning to find Justin Beiber as my wall paper.

So, I knew I had to compile xscreensaver from scratch.  I ran out and downloaded it from http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/download.html and extracted it.  I found a couple of missing packages (aside from the development packages I'd installed previously), and found those in yum :

yum --enablerepo=base --enablerepo=updates --enablerepo=extras --enablerepo=epel --enablerepo=rpmforge install xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64 libXt-devel libXpm-devel motif-devel

Then..., I tried to compile it :

make distclean
./configure --with-motif
make

I kept running into undefined functions for pthread_join and pthread_create, and thought I was missing a library - but I wasn't.  Down that rabbit hole, I realized I had to patch it.  I tracked down (from the error message) that it was trying to assemble the bsod screensaver and getting those functions, so I opened up the Makefile and started checking it to see how the -pthread was being passed.  After tracking it down, I created the following patch :

diff -rupN xscreensaver-5.30-base/hacks/Makefile.in xscreensaver-5.30/hacks/Makefile.in
--- xscreensaver-5.30-base/hacks/Makefile.in    2014-09-11 11:07:53.000000000 -0600
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/hacks/Makefile.in 2014-09-12 09:48:05.017172709 -0600
@@ -671,7 +671,7 @@ truchet:     truchet.o      $(HACK_OBJS) $(COL)
        $(CC_HACK) -o $@ $@.o   $(HACK_OBJS) $(COL) $(HACK_LIBS)
 
 bsod:          bsod.o          $(HACK_OBJS) $(GRAB) $(APPLE2) $(XPM)
-       $(CC_HACK) -o $@ $@.o   $(HACK_OBJS) $(GRAB) $(APPLE2) $(XPM) $(XPM_LIBS)
+       $(CC_HACK) -o $@ $@.o   $(HACK_OBJS) $(GRAB) $(APPLE2) $(XPM) $(XPM_LIBS) $(THRL)
 
 apple2:                apple2.o apple2-main.o  $(HACK_OBJS) $(ATV) $(GRAB) $(TEXT)
        $(CC_HACK) -o $@ $@.o   apple2-main.o $(HACK_OBJS) $(ATV) $(GRAB) $(TEXT) $(XPM_LIBS) $(TEXT_LIBS) $(THRL)

Simply put - the bsod compile instructions missed having the THRL (pthread library) environment variable passed to it.  That was the ONLY patching I had to do.  It still didn't compile because of the xscreensaver-demo until I symlinked the following Directory :

 cd /usr/include/
 ln -s gdk-pixbuf-2.0 gdk-pixbuf

Compiled just fine!