>      1) In Gnome you can use Main Menu --> Preferences -->
> Screensaver.  From there you can uncheck "Lock Screen After...".
>      2) For just yourself if you have .xscreensaver in
> your home directory (and you may not until you've done=20
> Main Menu --> ...) you can edit the file to have line
> "lock: False" instead of "lock: True".
>      3) For all accounts which don't override it with a
> =2Exscreensaver file, you can as root replace "*lock:  True"
> with "*lock   False" in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XScreenSaver
>      4,...) For more ideas, "man xscreensaver".
<snip>

In case people don't notice the difference (ha!) SL50 (and the
upstream Vendor of course) no longer ship xscreensaver and under Gnome
at least it uses the gnome-screensaver which seems to default to
having locking enabled by default.

Like many gnome apps this doesn't make use of traditional X resources,
so one can either use the preferences panel, or use gconftool-2 (or
the gui gconf-editor I suppose) to set the values.

Here is how to do the tweaking with gconftool-2 from the command-line:

  $ gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_enabled
  true
  $ gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_enabled --type bool false
  $ gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_enabled
  false
  $ gconftool-2 --unset /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_enabled
  $ gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_enabled
  true

If you have the gnome screensaver preferences open you will see the
'lock' box change.  If you arn't running gconfd you probably want to
add the --direct option.

If you want to alter the default for all users then you can probably
something like the tricks used in the SL_desktop_tweaks package, to
use gconftool-2 to override some of the default values.

I will admit I've not tried that for individual keys; we do arrange to
load stuff (just like in SL_desktop_tweaks) to override the default
gnome panel settings - to give our default panel entries - but nothing
much else so far.

After a little thought (following a handful of complaints) we decided
that the Gnome default is probably right, ie people walking away from
their terminals should have it automatically locked.  Individuals can
turn it off if they dislike having to re-authenticate.

The one minor annoyance is that unlike xscreensaver it won't let
root's password unlock a screen, not that typing root's password into
a random app that a user may be running is a good idea anyway :-)

 -- Jon