Set the rootwindow for X

Introduction

This program is intended to set the root window (the wallpaper) of an X system with something interesting which changes over time.

There are several different types of displays that this can show:

xphoon This program shows the current phase of the moon.
xearth This program shows the earth. See the documentation to see how it is configured. There is a slightly modified version of this program which shows recent earthquakes around the world. Note that the default configuration of xearth, as called by rootwindow is quite CPU intensive. Have a 200MHz processor or change the parameters. The modified version of xearth is included in the distribution.
weather This module obtains a current satellite weather image of the west coast of the USA. In the daytime it fetches the visual image, and at night it picks up the infrared image (because it's dark out).
Astronomy picture of the day This module gets a new picture of the day from NASA.
SOHO This module gets current information from the SOHO solar observatory satellite.
Local or web based pictures You can have a collection of photos on your disk, or available from the web. You list all of the images in an appropriate file, one per line, and rootwindow will display a random image.

These modules are called in a user defined sequenence. If you want one to show up more often, then you define it in the sequence more often. The section on command line parameters explain how to set up your choices.

Requirements

This program requires a few features available on your system before you can use it.

You will want a 200MHz class or faster machine. This is a silly program and you don't want to slow down you work too much.
The display program from ImageMagick. This is used to actually set the root window.
A full time net connection. Some of the modules within this program expect to go out and fetch current information. If you don't have a full time connection, you will either need to avoid those modules, or alter the program to note when you do have a connection. At that point the program will be interferring with your normal activities, so that might not be such a good idea.
Perl version 5. You will also need the following perl modules:
- MIME::Base64
- URI
- HTML::Parser
- Net::FTP
- Digest::MD5
- HTTP::Status
- LWP::Simple
- Text::ParseWords (v3.1 or newer)
There is a small program named cpr written by Randal Schwartz, which I find convienient to use to install perl modules.
X. X is a windowing system available for some computers. I use it under Linux, but it is available for many platforms.
Access to the root window. Gnome and KDE (as two examples) keep a big window over the root window to keep you from doing anything interesting. With Gnome, (actually Nautilus), go to Start -> Programs -> Applications -> Nautilus -> Preferences -> Edit Preferences -> Windows & Desktop and turn off Use Nautilus to draw the desktop. You may also need to turn off Gnome's background processing at Programs -> Settings -> Desktop -> Background And deselect the checkbox that says Use GNOME to set background.
Supposedly, in KDE you can use Control Center -> Look & Feel -> Desktop -> Support Program in Desktop Window to allow programs to use the root window.
Doing the above steps may well deactivate features that you want. So you have to choose.

How to get and install rootwindow

You can pick up the entire archive for version v0.09. This contains all of the files mentioned on this page.

Once you have the tar file, you will need to extract and build it. Do something like the following:

	cd
	mkdir rootwindow
	tar xvfz rootwindow-0.09.tar.gz
	cd rootwindow-0.09
	make
	su
	make install

The distributed Makefile does not build the local xearth. There is a line in the Makefile you can enable to do so. You may need to do some configuration in the xearth directory, although I didn't need to.

It isn't required that this be "installed". That simply copies rootwindow into /usr/local/bin, and copies the distributed *.csv files to a ~/.rootwindow directory in your home directory.

Command line arguments

There are lots of command line options available for the rootwindow program. Most you shouldn't ever have to alter. These options can be set in your ~/.rootwindow.rc file or on the command line.

For a full set of the options, look at the command dispatch table in the program. I realize this is unusual, but some of the options have little reason to be changed from the defaults.

--sequence "csv quake xphoon weather soho astro" This lists the various modules you want run, and the order that they are run in. It is OK to list some modules more than others. The modules can also simply be listed after all of the named parameters are specified.
--csv-show number Specify the number of minutes that a picture from a CSV file is displayed.
--quake-time number Specify the number of minutes between collecting earthquake data.
--quake-show number Specify the number of minutes that earthquakes are shown.
--quake-params Specify the parmeters to xearth.
--weather-time number Specify the number of minutes between satellite updates.
--weather-show number Specify the number of minutes that the satellite image is shown.
--astro-time number Specify the number of minutes between fetching the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
--astro-show number Specify the number of minutes that the picture of the day is shown.
--soho-time number Specify the number of minutes between fetching the SOHO images.
--soho-show number Specify the number of minutes that the SOHO image is shown.
--xphoon-show number Specify the number of minutes that the phase of moon image is shown.
--display path_to_display Pathname of the display program.
--xearth path_to_xearth Pathname of the xearth program.
--montage path_to_montage Pathname of the montage program.
--xphoon path_to_xphoon Pathname of the xphoon program.
--display-flags flags Flags to the display program to get at image tinto the root window.
--geometry geometry-info Specify the geometry for a full screen looking like "-geometry 1152x864!"
--minsize SIZE Don't display small images. They usually aren't that interesting.
--maxsize SIZE Don't display huge images. A 7M image can cause the display program to bloat out to 70MB of memory usage.

Other programs

This package includes a number of additional programs. Some of these you might want to use yourself as part of this package, or for other purposes.

webc is a simple HTML preprocessor that I have been using for generating web pages.
cpr is a simple program to help install Perl modules.
randastro is a program to maintain a list of images available from NASA's Picture of the Day archive. Add a crontab entry which looks like:
```
		30 5 * * * .../randastro ~/.rootwindow/randastro2.csv
```
to keep your file up to date.
spider.web is a very trivial, not general purpose, program to find all of the images listed at a particular web site and build a *.csv file. It works for some sites.