Use a Web page as Screensaver (Linux)

Question

Is there an easy way to use a web page as a screen saver under Linux? preferably without allowing any interaction with whats presented.

I'd like idle admin desktops to show our network monitoring page.

Answer 1

The KDE Plasma Desktop allows "Widgets on the screensaver". You could use this to display the "Web browser widget" on the screensaver.

It's also possible to code your own widget in JavaScript or Python, making the interactions more restricted.

Answer 2

use cutycapt from http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/ ...

"CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to capture WebKit's rendering of a web page"

cron as "nobody" (or equivalent) every minute to run cutycapt into

imagedir/`date +nagios-%y-%m-%d_%T.jpg` 

and auto-cleanup at the same time as you create the image file

. * * * * * dir="/usr/share/admin/ScreenSaverDir" && a=`date +$dir/nagios-%y-%m-%d_%T.png` && CutyCapt --url=http://nagios.MyDomain.com/ --out=$a && b=`ls -1tr $dir | tail -1` && rm `ls -1  $dir | egrep -v $b`

aim your screensaver at that directory with a 1 min next-file-cycle

so the most recent image is going to be the only thing in that directory but it will have a unique-to-the-second filename, guaranteeing that it will not be cached by the screensaver

... want faster cycling than minute-old-images : do the cron line above in a shell script with a 5 second sleep and convince your screensavers to cycle every 3 or 5 seconds (maybe with a killall -HUP executed by the script on whatever screensaver is running?)