Hi, i created two utility that i use daily and want to share.
The first is xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator that is a modification of caffeine-indicator that work only with xsceensaver: GitHub - darkfrank-it/xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator: Modification of caffeine-indicator for xscreensaver
The second is sddm-bing-pod that override the standard lubuntu theme of sddm file wall.png with the Bing Picture of the day: GitHub - darkfrank-it/sddm-bing-pod: Set Microsoft Bing picture of the day as background of sddm of lubuntu theme.
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Thanks for your post and software. Good initiative. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve tried testing the sddm daily screen-changer. It seems to have a few rough edges though (how-to-install, exactly, mayby user rights). Anyway, I’ve ran the sddm-bing-pod script manually (as root), and it gave me an interesting ‘new’ login screen (as expected) 
Maybe I will keep using it, but then most likely with pictures from another source than Bing 
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I’ve figured out how to install the sddm-bing-pod software from Github. As root-user:
# cd; mkdir temp-darkfrank; cd temp-darkfrank
# git clone https_://github.com/darkfrank-it/sddm-bing-pod.git
# (the underscore above is to avoid parsing of the URL)
# dpkg-deb --build sddm-bing-pod
# dpkg -i ./sddm-bing-pod.deb
# systemctl enable sddm-bing-pod
# systemctl start sddm-bing-pod
# systemctl status sddm-bing-pod
All seems to be well. Well, I lied: a new welcome-screen should be available tomorrow 
But, there is something fishy with this. After this install, I tried the same procedure for the other software (xscreensave-caffeine-indicator). But, that does not allow me to execute dpkg -i.
I get the following:
(Reading database … 367723 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator.deb … .
Unpacking xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator (1.0.2) …
dpkg: error processing archive xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator.deb (–install):
trying to overwrite ‘/.git/HEAD’, which is also in package sddm-bing-pod 1.0.0
Errors were encountered while processing:
xscreensaver-caffeine-indicator.deb
For now, I was not really interested in the the caffeine-bit (just curious). However, it worries me that my first install (of sddm-bing-pod) according to my own emperical method is wrong, or that something else is wrong during the build.
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When the thread has all shaken out, this would make a good article for my site. It’d get more eyes on the project, as well.
This is kinda a note to myself, though I’ll also bookmark it.
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As I see it now, @darkfrank-it put some application specific files with the same name in the root of both his Github repositories.
To wit, the files LICENSE, README.md and the .git-directory. These are very application specific and should not be included in the root of the debian packages, or at least be placed somewhere else (on a application specific path for the caffeine c.q. bing-pod application). “Danger ahead”.
This explains that any second run of a darkfrank-it-package directly cloned from Github, and packaged my way, will result in writing files to places where they should not belong, and in this case, give conflicts.
Someone with more experience should easily be able tell us, if it is possible to package these very simple applications correctly, directly using an existing Github repository.
Or…sandboxing anyone??
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Thank you for your interest and reporting bug.
I find some time to fix the installation and some other bug in each project and make new releases.
I try to install in a VirtualBox fresh Lubuntu 22.04 and they seems to work.
I try to improve documentation too.
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I forgot about the nice ‘touch’ darkfrank made: metadata of the bing-picture is projected onto the daily image. Neat!
@darkfrank-it has updated sddm-bing-pod on Github. I will have a look at it later. My current solution works fine, but I appreciate any effort on usability, documentation and configuration. Thanks!
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I made a new and improved version of the tool.
It’s use a copy of the theme with a rectangle with text wrap to overlap the copyright information into image, so no more imagemagik is required and the script is faster so the image don’t risk to be blank anymore.
I also work to make a better .deb packaging so if you uninstall the package it leaves the system unchanged. If you already have installed a previuos version of the script you must copy the old wall.png inside /usr/share/sddm/themes/lubuntu to restore system default theme.
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Hi there,
i made a new version written in Rust that is more efficent and memory-saving of the caffeine indicator that provide a manual toggle to prevent the activation of xscreensaver:
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