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 XPenguins(1)                   XPenguins 2.2                   XPenguins(1)
                               1 October 2001



 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.

              Use the -t option to select the theme to describe.

      -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.





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                               1 October 2001



      -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



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 XPenguins(1)                   XPenguins 2.2                   XPenguins(1)
                               1 October 2001



              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.




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                               1 October 2001



      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, runner,
              explosion, squashed, zapped, splatted, angel, action?, where ?
              is a number between 0 and 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.





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 XPenguins(1)                   XPenguins 2.2                   XPenguins(1)
                               1 October 2001



      Some notes regarding the various activities. If you design a new
      theme, feel free to make the splatted, squashed, zapped and 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



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 XPenguins(1)                   XPenguins 2.2                   XPenguins(1)
                               1 October 2001



      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)
















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