Thursday, November 12, 2020

Setting Raspberry Pi to show name and clock when idle

 Whether connecting to console or VNC it does not hurt to be able to see the system is working and confirm you are on the right machine quickly when you have a few online.

First install the basic screen savers with

sudo apt-get install xscreensaver*

Start XScreenSaver. 


Under Display Modes, select Only One Screen Saver. Then scroll down and select GLText as your screen saver.


Click Settings. Select Display Date and Time and Always Face Front. Make sure that the check box next to Wander is selected. From the drop-down menu, select Don’t Rotate. Choose the frame rate that you want. 


Click the Advanced Tab. In the Text Manipulation field, click the radio button beside Text. In the field add your hostname and %n (UPSMon62 in this example)


For further customization variables see strftime.org For instance I prefer this