Earlier today I posted on how to activate the screen saver from the command line. But I hadn’t yet mentioned how to set it up. Before I do, let’s look at the /System/Library/Screen Savers directory. Here you should see a number of bundles, such as RSS Visualizer.qtz, Paper Shadow.slideSaver, Flurry.saver, Arabesque.qtz and any third party screen savers you may have installed. These are the paths to your screen savers.
In order to set which screen saver you would like to use from the command line, you’re going to use the defaults command along with the com.apple.screensaver domain. First let’s read the settings there:
defaults -currentHost read com.apple.screensaver
Which will provide the results:
{askForPassword = 1;
moduleName = FDEScreenSaver;
modulePath = “/usr/local/ppc-3.0.1-142/share/FDEScreenSaver.slideSaver”;}
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver modulePath -string “/System/Library/Screen Savers/iTunes Artwork.saver”
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver moduleName -string “iTunes Artwork”
And remember you can use that earlier article from today to test them as you’re going (or use a hot corner, which is what I usually do).
