XPENGUINS - cool little penguins walking along the tops of your windows Copyright (C) 1999-2001 Robin Hogan Version: 2.2 (1 October 2001) INTRODUCTION XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your root window. By default it will be penguins - they fall from the top of the screen, walk along the top of windows, up the side of windows and do various other stuff. Other themes in the base package are "Big Penguins" (50% bigger), "Classic Penguins" (reproducing XPenguins version 1.2), "Turtles", and "Bill". More themes can be downloaded from the XPenguins web site (http://xpenguins.seul.org/) - version 0.9 of the xpenguins_themes package contains "The Simpsons", "Sonic the Hedgehog", "Lemmings" and "Winnie the Pooh". To run the program, type "xpenguins" at the console. Type "xpenguins --help" to see the available options, or read the man page (type "man xpenguins"). If you want to make your own theme, read the THEMES section of the man page and have a look at the config file for the default theme (which is usually installed in /usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config). You may also find the gimp scripts "lay-out-frames.scm" and "resize-frames.scm" useful - the first lays out the frames of an animated gif side by side in a way that can be used by XPenguins, and the second resizes an XPenguins image frame by frame to avoid bleeding of colors between adjacent frames. INSTALLATION Do the following: ./configure make make install (as root) By default everything will be installed in /usr/local. Use "./configure --prefix=/usr" (or similar) to install it somewhere else. For more information, read the INSTALL file, or type "./configre --help". If you have problems with the make process then try using "gmake" instead of "make". LICENSE This program is released under the GNU general public license - see the COPYING file. This license applies to everything in the base distribution, including the themes "Penguins", "Classic Penguins", "Big Penguins", "Turtles" and "Bill". FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION "The program is running but I can't see any penguins. Why?" "KDE 2, CDE, Enlightenment 0.16 (for desktops > 0), the Nautilus file mangler, and possibly others, all put a big X window over the root window. In the case of KDE 2.0 and 2.1, Enlightenment and Nautilus 1.0, XPenguins should be able to find this window and draw to it instead of drawing to the root window. It then reports "Drawing to XXX Desktop" when it runs. Unfortunately there is no standardised way to find the correct window, so in later versions of any of these programs it might fail. When this happens the program looks like it's running but no toons are visible. Also, hybrid combinations such as KDE plus enlightenment might fail. CDE will probably never work, although XPenguins should definitely work with simpler window managers like sawfish and blackbox. I have had reports of problems with KDE 2.2. This will be fixed when I get access to a machine running KDE 2.2." TOP TIP If you have gtk-shell installed, try this courtesy of Carles Amigó. At the end of your ~/.bashrc file add the line: alias xpselect="xpenguins -t \`gtk-shell -l \"Select a Theme:\" -c \\\`xpenguins -l |sed s/\" \"/_/g\\\` -t xpenguins -b \"Ok\"\`" Now from a new terminal "xpselect" will allow you to select the theme in a handy dialog box. If you run Korn shell, put the line in your ~/.kshrc file instead. It'll probably work with csh too, but will need some modification. CODE GUIDE You are welcome to modify or borrow any of this code, under the conditions of the GNU GPL. The code is in the src directory and is organised as follows: The toon_*.c files contain functions for animating images on the root (or other) window. They also hide the X calls from higher-level code. Each function is prefixed with "Toon" - you can see which functions are in which file by looking at the header file toon.h. One function that might be useful in other programs is ToonGetRootWindow() in toon_root.c; this finds the appropriate window to draw to when Nautilus/Enlightenment/KDE and so on are running. Certainly there are programs out there (e.g. xearth and xplanet) that sometimes don't work properly in these environments. The xpenguins_*.c files contain functions (prefixed with xpenguins_) that load themes and govern the behaviour of the penguins. The header file xpenguins.h describes briefly what each function does. The user interface code then interprets the various user-supplied options and implements them by calling xpenguins functions; in this way different XPenguins front ends produce penguins that behave in the same way. This package is the command-line version - the front-end code is in main.c. The GNOME graphical front (the xpenguins_applet package) uses exactly the same toon and xpenguins files. Therefore if you make a modification to the program that you would like me to include in a future release, please do it in such a way that it will work in all versions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Inspiration was provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of the classic "xsnow". Many of the penguin images were taken from "Pingus", a free lemmings clone for Linux (http://pingus.seul.org/), and were designed by Joel Fauche <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and Craig Timpany <timpany@es.co.nz>. Rob Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com> provided some new penguin images now used in the default theme. AUTHOR Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk> The XPenguins homepage is located at http://xpenguins.seul.org/ SEE ALSO Michael Vines <isamu@neomueller.org> has rewritten the program (as of version 1.1) for Microsoft Windows and called it "WinPenguins" - visit http://neomueller.org/~isamu/winpenguins/
