Triggering gnome screen-saver timeout from console keypresses?

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Hi.

Now that Orca really works great these days, I do have a logged in
GNOME session on my workstation all the time.  However, since
the braille support for gnome-terminal is still lacking
a few things I really got used to as a long term syssadmin
on the linux console with BRLTTY, I do not do all of my work inside GNOME.
In fact, I spend maybe only 10% of my computer time in a GNOME session,
the rest of the time I just use a plain Linux console to do remote
admin work and all my emacs activities (mail, irc, editing source code...)

This usage pattern triggers an anoying problem here:  The X11
screen saver has kicked in every time I switch back to my
X11 console (Alt+F7).  While I understand why there is a password
prompt, I do argue that the behaviour of the timeout detection
of the X11 screen saver is broken, since it does not
take into account keypresses that might have happened somewhere
else (like on a text console).

Does anyone know if there is:
 1.) A hack that I could use to fix this ASAP?
 2.) A way to fix this permanently for everyone else (i.e., something we could
     implement upstream so that console keypresses are taken into account
     by default)?


A typical situation is like:
 1. I read something with FireFox and Orca on my X11 console (Alt+F7).
 2. I get distracted and need to do something in a command-shell, so
    I switch to a free text console, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1.
 3. I work there for half an hour or more, but I do something, i.e., the
    keyboard constantly clicks away...
 4. I finish and want to continue reading that website, so I
    switch back to X11 (Alt+F7).
 5. Here, the screen saver has kicked in and I am asked to enter
    my user password to "unlock" the screen again.

This costs unnecessary time and typing.  Ideally, the screen
saver would only kick in if there really was no activity on the keyboard
or with the mouse in a defined time period, no matter if the
keypress happened inside X11 or not.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕ | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
  .''`. | Get my public key via finger mlang/key db debian org
 : :' : | 1024D/7FC1A0854909BCCDBE6C102DDFFC022A6B113E44
 `. `'
   `-      <URL:http://delysid.org/>  <URL:http://www.staff.tugraz.at/mlang/>