Gnome root window...

[Bill Mullen]

I have a similar, but somewhat more involved, problem regarding painting 
the root window in Gnome, and have unfortunately not yet come up with a 
suitable solution, so perhaps an appeal to the group will help.

In response to some interest expressed in alt.os.linux.mandrake, I have
lately thrown together a first draft of a mini-HOWTO and some (woefully
amateurish) scripts to enable other Mandrake users to duplicate the method
that I use to get Hari Nair's Xplanet program to display an animated view
of Earth in one's root window using regularly-updated cloud data, as in
the following screenshots:

IceWM: http://www.lunarhub.com/~moon/desktop.jpeg
Blackbox: http://www.lunarhub.com/~moon/desktop2.jpeg

The mini-HOWTO, in its current (embarrassingly unpolished) state is at:
http://www.lunarhub.com/~moon/xphowto.html

The system works wonderfully in "lightweight" window managers such as 
IceWM, *box, Xfce, and the like - full "orbiting" animation, without 
changing one's default background settings at all. It works in a limited 
fashion under KDE (as detailed in the HOWTO - fixed vantage point only), 
by using KDE's capacity to execute a program to set the background.

But as for Gnome, still no joy.

As Gnome appears to have no corresponding ability to repeatedly execute a
program/script for this as KDE does, and completely ignores the attempts
of xplanetbg to draw to the root window directly, I'm at a loss as to how
to get some or all of this functionality going under Gnome.

Even if I were to write scripts similar to the KDE ones, perhaps by first
drawing an image, then using xsetroot to display it, sleeping a bit, and
looping indefinitely, I still need to determine the existing root window's
geometry (a parameter conveniently supplied by KDE) for it to look at all
presentable.

I would greatly welcome anyone's thoughts on this, or on any other aspect 
of this little project. The HOWTO needs a lot of work yet to be clearer 
and more concise, that much I know. It's what I don't know/have overlooked 
that worries me ... :) 

-- 

Bill Mullen
6:59pm, 2002-08-09