NAME¶
xpenguins - cute little penguins that walk along the tops of your windows
SYNOPSIS¶
xpenguins [-option ...]
DESCRIPTION¶
XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your root
window. By default it will be penguins - they drop in from the top of the
screen, walk along the tops of your windows, up the side of your windows,
levitate, skateboard, and do other similarly exciting things. Be careful when
you move windows as the little guys squash easily. If you send the program an
interupt signal (such as by hitting Ctrl-C) they will burst.
XPenguins
is now themeable, so it is easy to select something else to animate instead of
penguins, or even (with a little artistic talent) define your own; see the
THEMES section below.
OPTIONS¶
In all the following cases a double dash can be replaced by a single dash.
- -a, --no-angels
- Do not show any cherubim flying up to heaven when a toon gets
squashed.
- -b, --no-blood
- Do not show any gory death sequences.
- -c dir, --config-dir dir
- Look for config files and themes in this directory. The default is usually
/usr/share/xpenguins.
- -d display, --display display
- Send the toons to the specified X display. In the absence of this option,
the display specified by the DISPLAY environment variable is
used.
- -h, --help
- Print out a message describing the available options.
- -i, --theme-info
- Print out the auxiliary information about a theme and exit. Use the
-t option to select the theme to describe.
- --random-theme
- Start with a random theme.
- -l, --list-themes
- List the available themes, one on each line, and exit.
- -m delay, --delay delay
- Set the delay between each frame in milliseconds. The default is defined
by the theme.
- -n number, --penguins number
- The number of toons to start, up to a maximum of 256. The default is
defined by the theme.
- -p, --ignorepopups
- Toons fall through `popup' windows (those with the save-under attribute
set), such as tooltips. Note that this also includes the KDE panel.
- -r, --rectwin
- Toons regard all windows as rectangular. This option results in faster
calculation of window positions, but if you use one of those fancy new
window managers with shaped windows then your toons might sometimes look
like they're walking on thin air.
- -s, --squish
- Enable the penguins to be squished using any of the mouse buttons. Note
that this disables any existing function of the mouse buttons on the root
window.
- -t theme, --theme theme
- Use the named theme. The default is Penguins. If the theme has
spaces in its name then you can use underscores instead, or alternatively
just put the name in double quotes. This option can be called multiple
times to run several themes simultaneously.
- -q, --quiet
- Suppress the exit message when an interupt is received.
- -v, --version
- Print out the current version number and quit.
- --all
- Load all available themes and run them simultaneously.
- --id window
- Send toons to the window with this ID, instead of the root window or
whichever window is appropriate for the current desktop environment. Note
that the ID of X clients reported by xwininfo is rarely that of the
foremost visible window that should be used here.
- --nice loadaverage1 loadaverage2
- Start killing toons when the 1-min averaged system load exceeds
loadaverage1; when it exceeds loadaverage2 kill them all.
The toons will reappear when the load average comes down. The load is
checked every 5 seconds by looking in /proc/loadavg, so this option
only works under unices that implement this particular pseudo file
(probably just Linux). When there are no toons on the screen,
XPenguins uses only a miniscule amount of CPU time - it just wakes
up every 5 seconds to recheck the load.
THEMES¶
The system themes are usually kept in
/usr/share/xpenguins/themes, and
these can be augmented or overridden by the user's themes in
$HOME/.xpenguins/themes. Each theme has its own subdirectory which to
be valid must contain a file called
config. The name of the theme is
taken from the directory name, although because many install scripts choke on
directory names containing spaces, all spaces in a theme name are represented
in the directory name by underscores. Any directory name containing spaces is
inaccessible by
xpenguins.
In addition to the
config file, the theme directory contains the toon
images that make up the theme in the form of
xpm image files.
Additionally, there should be an
about file which gives information on
the creator of the theme, the license under which it is distributed and
various other things. This file is principally for use by
xpenguins_applet, an applet for
GNOME that allows different
themes to be selected at the click of a button.
The
config file has a reasonably straightforward format. You can either
read this rather terse description of it or you can have a look at the config
file for the default
Penguins theme, which is usually installed at
/usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config, and is reasonably well
commented. We'll first establish some simple terminology. Say you have a
Farmyard theme with cows and sheep. The cows and sheep are types of
toon, while the various things they get up to (walking, mooing and so
on) are termed
activities. Each
activity has its own
xpm
image file, in which the
frames of the animation are laid out
horizontally. Some activities (notably walking) use different images depending
on the
direction the toon is moving in. In this case the frames for the
two directions are laid out one above the other in the image.
As in shell scripts, comments are initiated with the
# character and hide
the remainder of the line. The format is entirely free except that there is an
arbitrary limit on the length of a line of 512 characters. Spaces, tabs and
newlines all count equally as white space. Data is entered as a sequence of
key value pairs, all separated by white space. Neither the
keys
nor the
values are case sensitive, except where the
value is a
filename. The following
keys are understood:
- delay delay
- Set the recommended delay between frames in milliseconds.
- toon toon
- Begin defining a new toon called toon. If only one type of toon is
present in the theme then this key may be omitted.
- number number
- Set the default number of toons of the current type to start.
- define activity
- Begin defining an activity for the current toon. The currently
understood activities are walker, faller, tumbler,
climber, floater, runner, explosion,
squashed, zapped, splatted, angel, exit
and action?, where ? is a number between 0 and
6. Once you've seen the program in action you should be able to
guess which is which. A valid theme must contain at least walkers
and fallers. Additionally, you may define a default activity (with
define default); any properties (such as width and
speed) set here are then adopted by the activities defined from
then on, if they do not themselves explicitly define those properties.
After an activity has been declared with define, the following
properties may be assigned:
- pixmap xpmfile
- The file containing the image data for the activity. Note that you may not
set a default pixmap.
- width width
- The width of each frame of the animation in pixels.
- height height
- The height of each frame of the animation in pixels.
- frames frames
- The number of frames in the animation.
- directions directions
- The number of directions for the activity (can be 1 or 2).
- speed speed
- The initial speed of the toon when engaged in this activity, in pixels per
frame.
- acceleration acceleration
- The rate at which the speed increases, in pixels per frame squared. This
property is not utilised by all activities.
- terminal_velocity terminal_velocity
- The maximum speed in pixels per frame, again not utilised by all
activities.
- loop loop
- Only understood by the actions; indicates how many times to repeat
the action. If negative, then the probility of stopping the action every
time the action is complete is -1/loop.
Some notes regarding the various activities. If you design a new theme, feel
free to make the
splatted,
squashed,
zapped and
exit animations as gory and bloody as you like, but please keep the
explosion activity nice and tame; that way those of a nervous
disposition can employ the
--no-blood option which replaces all these
violent deaths with a tasteful explosion that wouldn't offend your
grandmother. Xpm images files are a factor of two smaller if you can limit the
number of colours in the image such that only one character need be used to
represent each colour; this also makes
XPenguins start up much more
rapidly. Rarely are more than 64 colours required.
So that's about it for the
config file, now for the
about file.
This is very simple. Again comments are initialised by a
#. An entry
consists of a
key at the start of a line, followed by the corresponding
value which is read up to the next newline. The following
keys
are understood, although none are compulsory.
- artist
- Used to list the artist(s) who created the original images.
- maintainer
- The person who compiled the images into an XPenguins theme. It is
useful if an email address can also be provided.
- date
- The date when the theme was last modified. My preferred format is day
of the month, name of the month in english, full year.
For example: 24 April 2001.
- icon
- The name of an image file that can be used as an icon for the theme; XPM
and PNG are suitable formats.
- license
- The name of the license under which the theme is distributed (e.g.
GPL).
- copyright
- The year and holder of the copyright.
- comment
- Any other essential information, such as the theme's web site, as brief as
possible.
Please test any about files you create by looking at how the
information is displayed by the xpenguins_applet program.
AUTHOR¶
Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk>.
CREDITS¶
Inspiration provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of the
classic
xsnow. Most penguin images were taken from
Pingus, a
free lemmings clone that can be found at <
http://pingus.seul.org/>;
these images were designed by Joel Fauche <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and
Craig Timpany <timpany@es.co.nz>. Additional images in version 2 by Rob
Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com> and Robin Hogan.
NOTES¶
XPenguins can load an X server and/or network (although the CPU time used
is small), and if a large number of penguins are spawned then they may begin
to flicker, depending on the speed of the X server.
The
xpenguins homepage is located at:
http://xpenguins.seul.org/
BUGS¶
A new feature since version 2.1 is the ability to draw to windows other than the
root window in situations where the window manager or desktop environment
places a large window over the root window that would otherwise obscure the
toons. Currently
XPenguins can draw to the KDE Desktop (KDE 2.0 and
2.1), Enlightenment desktops greater than 0 (E16), the Nautilus desktop and
the virtual root window of certain window managers like amiwm. Of course,
simpler window managers that don't mess around like this will still work
(sawfish, blackbox and countless others). It cannot work with CDE and probably
never will. Future versions of KDE, Enlightenment and Nautilus may not work;
the classic symptom of this is that
XPenguins sits there as if it's
doing something, but no toons are visible. If this happens, try running the
program with one of the simpler window manager listed above, or visit the
XPenguins web site and download the latest version. If there are icons
drawn on the root window then the toons will erase them when they walk over
them, although an expose event will be sent to the window every 100 frames to
redraw them.
FILES¶
$HOME/.xpenguins/themes/*
/usr/share/xpenguins/themes/*
/proc/loadavg
SEE ALSO¶
xsnow(1), xroach(1),
xwininfo(1) pingus(6)