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 :)