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I have a number of laptops and PCs running in my home, generally running Ubuntu 14.04 with the gnome window manager

I used to love having the Electric Sheep screen saver, I understand the Gnome people have decided the idea of screen savers is no longer relevant. I don't want a screen saver, I want a gorgeous changing graphic to replace my screen image when my computers are on but not being directly used (Electric sheep was amazing). This includes my desk laptop, my lounge multimedia machine driving a huge monitor, my workbench computer and my travelling laptop

It seems no one anywhere has electricsheep running on 14.04 LTS.

How do I run it?

thanks

Leo Ramakers
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3 Answers3

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According to the electric sheep Linux Client Instructions, the ichthyo/zeug PPA can be used (on Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04, 15.10, and 16.04):

  1. Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T

  2. Run the following:

    sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ichthyo/zeug
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install electricsheep
Chai T. Rex
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aasche
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It's on Github now. To compile, you'll need wxwidget 3.0 dev and Flam3, as mentioned here:

If you have Ubuntu 10.04 or Debian Sid, then you can just use the package manager or type sudo apt-get install electricsheep, although that will get you an old version, it should work fine.

Otherwise, the preferred way to install it is from source.

sudo apt-get install subversion autoconf libtool libgtk2.0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev

liblua5.1-0-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev libjpeg8-dev libgtop2-dev libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-thread-dev libtinyxml-dev freeglut3-dev glee-dev

Install wxWidgets 3.0.

install from source flam3 (./configure; make; sudo make install), and then checkout client source and then ./autogen.sh; ./configure; make; sudo make install.

It should configure itself to be your screensaver, but you can also run it from the command line just by typing electricsheep. You can also use electricsheep-preferences to configure it.

I have it running on my end, just trying to figure out how to make it a screensaver.

Eric Carvalho
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Ryan MacLean
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    Late I know, but did you figure out the "how to make it a screensaver" part? If you're by any chance already using XScreenSaver, as per these instructions all it takes is adding GL: electricsheep --root 1 \n\ to your config. – KlaymenDK Aug 30 '16 at 08:19
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I'm guessing you mean this Electric Sheep?

Well the theoretical steps would be

  1. Satisfy dependancies. Install in the following order: libsvga1 (32-bit, 64-bit), esound-common (32-bit, 64-bit), libaudiofile1(32-bit, 64-bit), libesd0 (32-bit, 64-bit), mplayer (32-bit, 64-bit), flam3 (32-bit, 64-bit) etc... for every other package the Ubuntu Software says it needs and that the packages it needs, needs and so on

  2. Install Electric Sheep (32-bit, 64-bit)

However, I installed all the packages above but don't want to go any further because I'm worried that packages will start to conflict and I'll end up with a broken system. There's probably a reason why simply installing it and installing the dependencies through APT doesn't work.

Indeed, they rejected it for inclusion in the 14.04 repositories because it's 'orphaned, RC-buggy, [has] licence problems'.

Sadly, if you really want Electric Sheep, because it seems quite old you'll have to run it on Ubuntu 12.04 (which is supported for another two years). Ubuntu 14.04 just doesn't have the (presumably legacy) packages that Electric Sheep needs.

Ads20000
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    Thank you, I tried compiling it from source, but that broke. I sought help from the electric sheep coders but got no reply. I guess the flock has died. Thank you so much for your efforts – Leo Ramakers Mar 17 '15 at 04:00