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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-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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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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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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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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