alock

a minimal (transparent) screenlocker for X, formerly based on xtrlock .. for those who just want to lock it, nothing more, nothing less.

about

‘alock’ locks your current session in X. its not a fullfeatured screensaver-distribution like ‘xlockmore’ or ‘xscreensaver’ but just a tiny locker: “uh, i need coffee .. lock” .. speaking of size: binary takes only 11kb. ‘alock’ shows the content of the locked screen .. so you can see whats going on, even when you are not able to modify what you see. this is pretty usefull for public terminals where a demo should run which shouldnt interupted (you know those little kids who press every button and click everywhere …).

an irc-friend of mine (izhirahider) wanted to use ‘xtrlock’ and had some problems with it .. no wonder, development stopped some years ago and it doesnt support pam. since i liked the minimalism of ‘xtrlock’ but wanted to add some minor things to it i “forked” ‘alock’ from ‘xtrlock’ and modified it a bit :) since i am really bad in creating names for my projects i normally just choose “ak” + something that is somehow related to what the project does. on the other hand: i always wanted to dedicate one of my projects to my friend, anja. she also came up with “alock” herself and so its “alock” now and not “aklock”.

news

the current changelog is available here:

http://darkshed.net/files/c_cpp/alock/CHANGELOG.txt

download and installation

first you need the package tarball:

to build it you will need gmake, a c compiler as gcc and xlibs

configure it,



$> configure --help

build it



$> gmake

and install it



$> sudo gmake install

and thats it. tested platforms (so far):

usage

alock [-vh] [-blank] [-auth method] [-cursor cursor]
        -h       displays a little help
        -v       displays version number
        -blank   hides the content of the screen with a big, black area
        -cursor  changes cursor appeareance.
        -auth     chooses the authentification-method

after locking ‘alock’ will show a modified mousecursor. you have to enter your password blindly. if its the correct password the screen will unlock. you can build ‘alock’ with different auth-methods. among those choicses there is md5/sha1-support. with that you can use ‘alock’ even on systems where you dont have the permissions to install something or access the password-system.

development

you can make suggestions and bugreports to ‘alock’s developersite:

http://code.google.com/p/alock/

as soon as google allows to import a svn dump i ll setup a public svn. till then i ll release svn-snapshots from time to time. since the “interest” in ‘alock’ is not really HUGE i think its ok.

todo

authors