Finally, about two years after originally hunting for a way to run a screensaver at the console, I have an answer.
And the answer is screen. I’ll apologize beforehand if somebody happened to mention this and I somehow overlooked it, but I was cruising through the man page for screen today. I found two settings which combine to trigger a kind of screensaver effect.
The first is blankerprg, which sets the command for the screensaver “application,” and idle, which sets the timeout and triggers the blankerprg.
Assuming you have cmatrix installed, add these two lines to your .screenrc (or enter them directly into screen while it’s running, with the CTRL+A ‘:’ sequence):
blankerprg cmatrix -ab -u2
idle 60 blanker
(Note the second line doesn’t say blankerprg; blanker is the invocation and blankerprg is the “variable” it starts.)
Now, in 60 seconds, your screen session should switch to the cmatrix program, and continue over the entire terminal area until you press a key. Cool, huh?
While you’re at it, you can substitute anything you like in there for cmatrix. Try tty-clock -r for some fun, or cacafire (assuming you have those installed, of course 😉 ). If you can find a console game with an “attract mode,” that might be interesting too.
Wow, it feels good to find an answer to that, even if it did take two years. … 
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I don’t see a machine with a crt monitor on your hardware page. So, is there a practical use for screensaver?
(Though, I’m all for tinkering for its own sake.)
One practical use would be that remote screen sessions over the internet can be timed out and disconnect by firewalls when idle. This would be a way to prevent it when it becomes idle.
Technically no, there’s no need. But it’s pretty cool. (But as I understand it, CRT’s aren’t the only ones susceptible to burn-in.)
asciiquarium is another cool console screensaver. http://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/html/
That does look cool, thanks. I might have to try that one.
The console window manger VWM has a screen saver as well.
FreeBSD has had VGA console screensavers for over a decade. http://www.freebsddiary.org/screensaver.php
l0L this is so cool, thanks
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@7
Yeah, but FBSD has been useful for nothing excepts server use for over a decade 😀
Awesome post as usual K. Mandla!!