Prevent Xfce from darwing desktop background

[Brian J. Tarricone]

andreas at an3as.eu wrote:

>> I suppose I could implement a sort of "foreign mode" that tells  
>> xfdesktop to stop drawing anything on the desktop at all, and then other  
>> apps could draw on it.
> 
> This is exactly what I want and if I remember right xfce 4.4 worked
> like this.

Well, if it worked with 4.4, I don't really know why it doesn't work 
now.  4.6 did not see many (any?) changes with the icon view.  Unless 
the double buffering of the desktop window broke something... not sure 
how, though.
> 
>> This probably wouldn't be compatible with  
>> desktop icons, though the right- and middle-click menus would at least  
>> still work.
> 
> This is what I want - just getting rid of any desktop icons and anything
> else.  Xfce should just leave the desktion alone for other apps.

Then again, I'm not sure why this doesn't work.  If you disable desktop 
icons, the model is exactly the same.  Do you have a background image 
set in desktop preferences?  If so, turn that off.

Are you telling xplanet to draw to xfdesktop's window?  If not, why not? 
  If not, I don't see how it ever worked in 4.4.

>> Your other option for xplanet is just to have it save to a regular png  
>> or jpg file and then set that as xfdesktop's wallpaper.  How to do so,  
>> and how to get it to update when the image changes, is an exercise left  
>> to the reader (and google).
> 
> Well, I use xplanet as my prefered "clock" featuring a projection of
> the sun at the current location and also as weather report by downloading
> cloud images 4 times a day.  So the image is changing frequently and
> I'm a bit reluctant to find a solution to work around a feature I found
> in xfce 4.4.  So if it is not too much hassle for you I would really love
> to have this option back (and using old 4.4 meanwhile).

Well, how often does it change?  It really doesn't matter one bit; you 
can automate the entire thing.

Feel free to open a feature request on bugzilla; I may or may not get to 
it.  Someone else is free to write a patch, too, of course ^_~.

	-brian