First: The crew maintaining the Gnome window manager are a real arrogant bunch. Through version 2 and hardcore into version 3, they have taken away options from users, deviating from the flexibility that popularized Linux towards forcing a single vision of how to operate on the desktop upon their users. I think they're dicks for this.
One way this manifests is they now no longer ship a real screensaver. gnome-screensaver just presents a blank screen with the time and logged-in user name at the top of each screen. They expect that when you aren't using the system, the display should simply be shut off. Well fuck you guys. Early on, it was kind of a pain to enable XScreensaver, but it's been worked out.
First: There are Fedora RPMs available so
yum install xscreensaver xscreensaver-extras2) Change what Gnome runs at startup:
gnome-session-propertiesDisable the "Screensaver" entry, and create one called "XScreensaver". The command to use is
/usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash3) Open the System Settings panel. In the "Screen" pane, turn off the option to lock the screen. (Gnome won't be doing that itself anymore.)
4) In the "Keyboard" pane, go to Shortcuts, and under System, disable the "Lock Screen" shortcut. (Click whatever key sequence is there, and hit backspace to clear it.) Under Custom, create a new shortcut, call it
Lock with XScreensaver/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -lock. The shortcut I use is Windows-L. (It stores as "Mod4-L") (I got really used to that when I had a Windows desktop.)You will probably find that hitting Windows-L right now doesn't lock your screen. That's another Gnomism I don't understand offhand, but it's a quick fix. In the Keyboard pane of the System Settings app, look for Typing, then Layout Settings, then Layouts, then Options. Under Alt/Win key behavior, select
Hyper mapped to Win-keys 