Can we manage screen saver start time through Configuration Profiles?

[stevehahn]

I'm being asked to enforce a policy on clients to start the screen saver after X minutes. I'd rather do this through a Configuration Profile rather than MCX. Is there a way to do this?

[m_entholzner]

You can do this with a simple defaults write too.

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.*.plist idleTime 600

this will set the idle time to 600 seconds. Another way is to capture the preference, package it with composer, deploy and run a Fix ByHost afterwards.

[tuinte]

I'm doing what entholzner suggests (defaults write). Users, of course, can then change it themselves, though, unless you lock down the pref pane. In our environment this isn't a big deal as we set display sleep to get the behaviour we want from machines left unattended, but thought I'd chime in on what might be a potential limitation to the defaults write (or Composer capture) method(s).