screensavers

Scripts and tooling to create Live Linux distributions and turn them into screensavers for use on Microsoft Windows systems.

I was rather taken with freeduc-cd 1.4.1 (still available from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ofset/files/freeduc-cd/1.4.1/ ) and GamesKnoppix ( http://mirrors.sandino.net/knoppix/GamesKnoppix-3.7-0.2-EN/ ) and I wondered whether they coud be brought up to date. Most of the source is nowadays part of Debian, so I extracted the list of packages with 'dpkg' by running each in a VM and scp-ing the output to the hosting machine; I needed to use a CentOS 8 host because most linux distributions nowadays do not recognise the ancient ciphers which were in use then.

Then I found the live-build package. I wrote a script scripts/bin/do_oi to build a suitable Live Linux iso. To run this, you should 'git clone' this repo under ~/eclipse-workspace ; then go to an empty directory, and run this script as sudo ~/eclipse-workspace/screensavers/scripts/bin/do_oi freeduc bullseye or sudo ~/eclipse-workspace/screensavers/scripts/bin/do_oi gk bullseye

This results in an 'iso' which can be run in a VM or booted on a real system. But I wanted to run it as a screensaver for Windows, so I have a further set of tools which packages it with qemu on a Windows system.

To use these tools, go to a Microsoft Windows system, install cygwin with the 'mingw' compilers (86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc) and install inno setup. With these and the contents of the 'packaging' directory you can build a screensaver wrapper for 'qemu', and a package for installation in the usual way for Windows.

Then go back to Linux, set up a file tree matching what you see in the reference installation package, and use 'zip' to pack it all into one file. Then take this to your Windows system and test it.