[phendrenad2]

To be fair, what you're looking for (black but not off) is probably not something many people would want or care about. But it does demonstrate how (A) inflexible and (B) feature-poor most Linux distros are

[qot]

I'm really just looking to display a screensaver which _is_ something people want and care about.

All screensaver software that I've seen supports displaying an image / slide show which I will simply set to a black image. Another common feature is just displaying black.

Note: in Windows both of these are quite easy.