Lock Screen without Affecting Background Programs?

[unL33T]

Hello all,

I've been locking my screen with the lock icon on the desktop which uses xlock but I've now noticed it messes up my background programs, specifically BOINC. If I lock the screen with this all running tasks in BOINC fail with "computation error" and they won't send the results or start running new tasks until the screen is unlocked again. From reading up on xlock this is probably expected behavior.

Is there a way to prevent this behavior or an alternative way to lock the screen with a password?

Thanks!

[HerrBert]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for...
From the xlock man pages:

-/+allowaccess
This option is required for servers which do not allow clients to modify the host access control list. It is also useful if you need to run x clients on a server which is locked for some reason... When allowaccess is true, the X11 server is left open for clients to attach and thus lowers the inherent security of this lock screen. A side effect of using this option is that if xlock is killed -KILL, the access control list is not lost.

To add this option to your default xlock configuration you have to edit the file /root/.config/Xlock/xlockscreenparams and insert the option -allowaccess in front of the -mode option (not necessarily in front of, but for compatibility with xlock setup application)
Not tested here, since i don't need or use applications in background if my screen is locked...

[unL33T]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for...
From the xlock man pages:

-/+allowaccess
This option is required for servers which do not allow clients to modify the host access control list. It is also useful if you need to run x clients on a server which is locked for some reason... When allowaccess is true, the X11 server is left open for clients to attach and thus lowers the inherent security of this lock screen. A side effect of using this option is that if xlock is killed -KILL, the access control list is not lost.

To add this option to your default xlock configuration you have to edit the file /root/.config/Xlock/xlockscreenparams and insert the option -allowaccess in front of the -mode option (not necessarily in front of, but for compatibility with xlock setup application)
Not tested here, since i don't need or use applications in background if my screen is locked...

Thanks! I think this worked. I did find it on my own earlier but from the description I wasn't sure if it was what I needed nor did I know how to implement it properly.

[unL33T]

Hmm didn't seem to work after all. Got the same results when locking the screen. When unlocked it still works fine.

[unL33T]

I ended up using "slock". Seems to work. Had to install "make" to build it which took a bit to figure out but it worked out in the end.

https://tools.suckless.org/slock/

[bigpup]

Any time you post, always, always, always, tell us what specific Puppy version you are using.

All Puppy versions have two additional SFS packages, you can load, to give you the needed files and programs, to compile software.
devx SFS
kernel sources SFS

Programs like make are in these SFS packages.
Because Puppy loads all of the OS into memory and most of the time, this stuff is not needed.
The SFS packages, allows it to be loaded, only when needed to compile, and then unloaded.

Usually info on where to get them, is in the specific topic, on the specific Puppy version.