If you wander away from your machine from time to time, it is nice to
be able to "lock" your console so that no one can tamper with, or look at,
your work. Two programs that do this are: xlock
and vlock
.
xlock
is a X display locker. It should be included in any Linux
distributions that support X. Check out the man page for it for more
options, but in general you can run xlock
from any xterm on your
console and it will lock the display and require your password to
unlock.
vlock
is a simple little program that allows you to lock some or all
of the virtual consoles on your Linux box. You can lock just the one
you are working in or all of them. If you just lock one, others can
come in and use the console; they will just not be able to use your
virtual console until you unlock it. vlock
ships with RedHat
Linux, but your mileage may vary.
Of course locking your console will prevent someone from tampering with your work, but won't prevent them from rebooting your machine or otherwise disrupting your work. It also does not prevent them from accessing your machine from another machine on the network and causing problems.
More importantly, it does not prevent someone from switching out of the X Window System entirely, and going to a normal virtual console login prompt, or to the VC that X11 was started from, and suspending it, thus obtaining your privileges. For this reason, you might consider only using it while under control of xdm.