Tag Archives: hack

“Loadsnake” AKA the Novell Netware snake screensaver clone

For those that didn't have the pleasure to see the old Novell Netware snakes screensaver, I'll say here that it was the default Netware screensaver, in console/text mode. It showed one snake for each CPU you had (99.9% of people had just 1 really). The cool thing is that the snakes became longer and longer as your server load increased. They also started going faster.

Anyway, this is one of those little time-wasting projects that usually go nowhere. I started working on a clone of this Netware screensaver in 2007. I remember I wanted to figure out how to write an xscreensaver "hack", so I spent a weekend looking at the source code for all the existing hacks, and I picked popsquares.c as a base and started tearing it apart, injecting dubious amounts of crappy C code until it did what I wanted.

Fast forward 4 years. Yesterday, for some reason, I got back to it, cleaned up the code a bit, and implemented a "fantastic" new feature I've always wanted: different snake colors for every different CPU, instead of all snakes being red. So I did, and the result is, well, see it for yourself:

Source code, but don't take inspiration from it, please… :) is up on github at http://github.com/cosimo/xscreensaver-loadsnake. You can also download the xscreensaver binary module if you want (only for Linux x86_64), as compiling it requires a bit of fiddling on the xscreensaver source code.

I have to admit that it's cool to run your own screensaver :)