xfdesktop and xplanet

[Didier Trosset]

Well, I managed to get both (xfdesktop for menus having an auto updating 
xplanet) but there are a few different things to setup.

You need first to use xplanet generating your background image in a 
file. For this, I added the following line to my ~/.xsession . It makes 
xplanet running in background and regulary (5 minutes by default IIRC) 
udpate the file :
/usr/bin/xplanet -proj=rect -geometry 1280x1024 \
   -output ~/var/xplanet.png &

Then I configured xfdesktop to use the generated image from xplanet. 
This is simplay done through the UI. Check the Show image box, and set 
the file to the generated ~/var/xplanet.png .

And now for the auto update, I just watched in the code and got that the 
  xfdesktop is updating its display (the backgound) and fetching again 
its sources (the image file) upon reception of a USR1 signal. That's why 
I added a line to my crontab:

0,15,30,45      *       *       *       *       kill -USR1 \
   `ps -ef | awk '{ if ($8 == "xfdesktop") print $2; }'`

It send each quarter an hour the USR1 signal to the process named 
'xfdesktop'. This can be enhanced cause sometimes the xfdesktop process 
gets killed (don't know why) and thus the kill command outputs an error.

But I've been happy with it for a few months now.

Didier


Erik Harrison wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 22:06:51 +0100, Fridtjof Busse <fbusse at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>>Hi
>>I'm quite new to xfce4 but I like it very much already :)
>>But I have a problem with XFCE 4.2.0: I want to run xplanet, which won't
>>work if xfdesktop is running at the same time.
>>But my changes to /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc won't change anything (I
>>commented xfdesktop and added the xplanet startup). No xplanet after
>>startup and still xfdesktop. I'm using startxfce4 in .xsession, but none
>>of what i put in /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc seems to be executed.
>>My editing of /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc to change Desktop to a
>>hidden folder also did nothing, am I assuming the wrong file?
>>
>>Where's my mistake (~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc is identical to the one
>>in /etc/xdg and no ~/.xfce4) and is there any better way to run xplanet?
>>Saving the session won't work since xplanet looses connection.
>>Thanks.
> 
> 
> Well, I believe there has been some tricks posted to the mailing list
> that will make xplanet play nice with xfdesktop. You may want to
> search the archives for that if you want to use xfdesktop's
> functionality.
> 
> But if you really want to replace xfdesktop with xplanet, you can't
> just uncomment xfdesktop from the startup script, since that is just a
> backup incase the session manager isn't available. First, add the
> command to start xplanet to .xinitrc (or, you can put a symlink in
> ~/Desktop/Autostart - this may be a better bet), and then kill
> xfdesktop, and log out saving your session. This will keep xfdesktop
> from coming back, and launch xplanet automatically.
> 
> 
>>--
>>Fridtjof Busse
>>BOFH Excuse #192:
>>
>>runaway cat on system.
>>_______________________________________________
>>Xfce mailing list
>>Xfce at xfce.org
>>http://lunar-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce
>>http://www.xfce.org
>>
> 
> 
>