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Like we were telling you a while back, Linux Mint 15 will get a new screensaver, among other cool new features and changes.

The work on the new Cinnamon screensaver has started and the code is available on GitHub:

Cinnamon Screensaver
Cinnamon Screensaver / lock screen (work in progress!)

Cinnamon Screensaver is a fork of GNOME Screensaver 3.4 and is very simplistic: for now, it displays the time and date along with the username and a shaded background, with a lock screen dialog similar to the one available for Unity, like you can see in the screenshot above.

According to its desktop file, the screensaver can be used not only in Cinnamon, but also in Unity (and I can confirm it works with Unity), Xfce or GNOME.

The new Cinnamon Screensaver is not available as a .deb yet so the only way to install it for now is to compile it from source. But it will probably be available soon in the Cinnamon nightly builds PPA and it may be backported for Linux Mint 14 Nadia. For now, it conflicts with GNOME Screensaver which must be removed for Cinnamon Screensaver to work properly.

Arch Linux users can already install Cinnamon Screensaver via AUR.