Originally posted by
KMan:
As Jim noted, the screensaver does not come with that functionality. But go to
www.versiontracker.com and you'll turn up a number of free programs that let you turn any screensaver into your desktop. (Search "screensaver desktop" -- no quotes -- to see them.) I use "BackLight" with the aquarium, personally, and think it works quite well. It's a great effect.
Be prepared for a somewhat sluggish system, however, unless you have a dual G5... even my iMac G5 slows down noticeably when it's running... this screensaver hits the CPU pretty hard, and it takes a dual processor machine to run well while the background is on.
You don't need a program to do this. Just type the following at a shell prompt (in terminal):
nice +20 /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
[Note that the above is supposed to be all one line, with no space between "Resources/" and "ScreenSaverEngine.app". I broke it in two to get it to fit.]
Running this with a nice of 20 tells the OS to give this the lowest priority, so it will run as fast as it can without impacting other programs, allways allowing other programs to have priority. This way it won't slow down other programs, but will still operate pretty quickly most of the time.
This assumes that MA2 is your default screen saver. If it isn't, you can use the "-module <module_name>" modifier to the command and specify the MA2 screen saver file as the module_name.