If you are having problems with running the GL screenhacs from xscreensaver,
but not from a window, please see
<http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#gl-mem>, especially if you
are using nVIdia's GL implementation. This has appeared as a SIGSEGV
crash and as a failutre to allocate GL context. In particular:

  1.I upgraded to 3.33, and xscreensaver won't run GL hacks any more (or
    they run slowly), but they work fine from the command line. 

    Try editing your .xscreensaver file and changing the memoryLimit
    setting to 0. Version 3.33 introduced the memoryLimit option as a
    precautionary limit to prevent runaway memory use if one of the
    display modes happened to be buggy; it prevents any program launched
    by xscreensaver from allocating more than that much memory. It
    defaults to 50M, which is a lot. However, apparently certain OpenGL
    libraries (notably nVidia) do something strange that makes them appear
    to allocate more than 128M of memory for every OpenGL program!
    Consequently, those programs die on startup because they aren't able
    to allocate memory. On some systems, memoryLimit doesn't cause the GL
    programs to crash, but instead, causes them to run slowly
    (non-accelerated.) Turning off the memory limit should work around
    this.

The OpenGL screenhacks are included as a separate package, so the base
xscreensaver package does not depend on Mesa. The postinst scripts will
automatically add a link so that the OpenGL screenhacks are used if they
are installed. If you wish to have the OpenGL screenhacks installed,
but not used, refer to the manpage and set the XScreenSaver*programs
to an appropriate value in /etc/X11/Xresources, a personal app-defaults
file, or your .Xdefaults.