use web page as screen saver?

[Alex Dean]

On Jul 27, 2010, at 9:51 AM, Matt Graham wrote:

> From: Alex Dean <alex at crackpot.org>
>> Getting software to display a series of images seems like
>> no problem.  I find lots of options there.  But I'd also like to
>> sometimes display a web page, so (for instance) I can see the weather
>> report from 7-8 am while I'm getting breakfast.
>>
>> I think I can probably do this with xscreensaver hacks, but I haven't
>> come across anything specific yet.  Anyone know of any tutorials for
>> displaying a web page as screensaver content?  (Or some other way to
>> get a web page displayed full-screen, without any window chrome at  
>> all.)
>
> "firefox http://example.org/", when the firefox process has started,  
> use
> xmacroplay to simulate an F11 keypress for "kiosk mode".  There's  
> probably a
> better way.  This is just what I thought of off the top of my head.   
> You could
> also use wmctrl to hide the window and keep the process running,  
> which would
> be better than stopping/restarting a heavyweight process if you want  
> web pages
> displayed at various times.  ISTR an xscreensaver module that  
> grabbed JPEGs
> from random places on the Net and displayed them, but that's just  
> slightly
> less complex than rendering HTML+CSS.  If the pages you need to  
> display aren't
> really complex, they might look OK in dillo or the GUI version of  
> links, but
> you'd have to test that out first.

Those are exactly the kinds of ideas I was hoping for.  Just some  
places to start exploring.  The fullscreen-firefox idea seems the most  
promising, since I can easily create PHP/Ruby/bash/Python/whatever  
scripts to make it do what I want.  That seems preferable to learning  
the config syntax for xscreensaver or other.

I will document how this all goes if/when it actually happens.  Gotta  
get the wife to sign off on the hardware purchase, but since it  
involves showing her more pictures of the kids, the odds are better  
than normal. :)

alex