Ubuntu Manpage: xpenguins - cute little penguins that walk along the tops of your windows

NAME

       xpenguins - cute little penguins that walk along the tops of your windows

SYNOPSIS

       xpenguins [-option ...]

DESCRIPTION

       XPenguins  is  a  program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your root window.  By default it will be
       penguins - they drop in from the top of the screen, walk along the tops of your windows, up the  side  of
       your  windows,  levitate,  skateboard,  and  do other similarly exciting things. Be careful when you move
       windows as the little guys squash easily.  XPenguins is now themeable, so it is easy to select  something
       else  to  animate  instead  of penguins, or even (with a little artistic talent) define your own; see the
       THEMES section below.

OPTIONS

In all the following cases a double dash can be replaced by a single dash.

-a, --no-angels
Do not show any cherubim flying up to heaven when a toon gets squashed.

-b, --no-blood
Do not show any gory death sequences.

-c dir, --config-dir dir
Look for config files and themes in this directory. The default is usually /usr/share/xpenguins.

-d display, --display display
Send the toons to the specified X display. In the absence of this option, the display specified
by the DISPLAY environment variable is used.

-h, --help
Print out a message describing the available options.

--defaults
Skip reading from ~/.xpenguinrc

--nomenu
Do not show menu

--nodoublebuffer
Do not use double buffering

--hidemenu
Iconify menu at startup

-i, --theme-info
Print out the auxiliary information about a theme and exit. Use the -t option to select the theme
to describe.

--random-theme
Start with a random theme.

-l, --list-themes
List the available themes, one on each line, and exit.

-m delay, --delay delay
Set the delay between each frame in milliseconds. The default is defined by the theme.

-n number, --penguins number
The number of toons to start, up to a maximum of 512. The default is defined by the theme.

-p, --ignorepopups
Toons fall through `popup' windows (those with the save-under attribute set), such as tooltips.
Note that this also includes the KDE panel.

-r, --rectwin
Toons regard all windows as rectangular. This option results in faster calculation of window
positions, but if you use one of those fancy new window managers with shaped windows then your
toons might sometimes look like they're walking on thin air.

-s, --squish
Enable the penguins to be squished using any of the mouse buttons. Note that this disables any
existing function of the mouse buttons on the root window.

--lift number
Lift penguins window number pixels, e.g. to keep above a panel.

-t theme, --theme theme
Use the named theme. The default is Penguins. If the theme has spaces in its name then you can
use underscores instead, or alternatively just put the name in double quotes. This option can be
called multiple times to run several themes simultaneously.

-q, --quiet
Suppress the exit message when an interrupt is received.

-v, --version
Print out the current version number and quit.

--all Load all available themes and run them simultaneously.

--id window
Send toons to the window with this ID, instead of the root window or whichever window is
appropriate for the current desktop environment. Note that the ID of X clients reported by
xwininfo is rarely that of the foremost visible window that should be used here.

--nice loadaverage1 loadaverage2
Start killing toons when the 1-min averaged system load exceeds loadaverage1; when it exceeds
loadaverage2 kill them all. The toons will reappear when the load average comes down. The load is
checked every 5 seconds by looking in /proc/loadavg, so this option only works under unices that
implement this particular pseudo file (probably just Linux). When there are no toons on the
screen, XPenguins uses only a minuscule amount of CPU time - it just wakes up every 5 seconds to
recheck the load.

THEMES

The system themes are usually kept in /usr/share/xpenguins/themes, and these can be augmented or
overridden by the user's themes in $HOME/.xpenguins/themes. Each theme has its own subdirectory which to
be valid must contain a file called config. The name of the theme is taken from the directory name,
although because many install scripts choke on directory names containing spaces, all spaces in a theme
name are represented in the directory name by underscores. Any directory name containing spaces is
inaccessible by xpenguins.

In addition to the config file, the theme directory contains the toon images that make up the theme in
the form of xpm image files. Additionally, there should be an about file which gives information on the
creator of the theme, the license under which it is distributed and various other things. This file is
principally for use by xpenguins_applet, an applet for GNOME that allows different themes to be selected
at the click of a button.

The config file has a reasonably straightforward format. You can either read this rather terse
description of it or you can have a look at the config file for the default Penguins theme, which is
usually installed at /usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config, and is reasonably well commented. We'll
first establish some simple terminology. Say you have a Farmyard theme with cows and sheep. The cows and
sheep are types of toon, while the various things they get up to (walking, mooing and so on) are termed
activities. Each activity has its own xpm image file, in which the frames of the animation are laid out
horizontally. Some activities (notably walking) use different images depending on the direction the toon
is moving in. In this case the frames for the two directions are laid out one above the other in the
image.

As in shell scripts, comments are initiated with the # character and hide the remainder of the line. The
format is entirely free except that there is an arbitrary limit on the length of a line of 512
characters. Spaces, tabs and newlines all count equally as white space. Data is entered as a sequence of
key value pairs, all separated by white space. Neither the keys nor the values are case sensitive, except
where the value is a filename. The following keys are understood:

delay delay
Set the recommended delay between frames in milliseconds.

toon toon
Begin defining a new toon called toon. If only one type of toon is present in the theme then
this key may be omitted.

number number
Set the default number of toons of the current type to start.

define activity
Begin defining an activity for the current toon. The currently understood activities are walker,
faller, tumbler, climber, floater, runner, explosion, squashed, zapped, splatted, angel, exit and
action?, where ? is a number between 0 and 6. Once you've seen the program in action you should
be able to guess which is which. A valid theme must contain at least walkers and fallers.
Additionally, you may define a default activity (with define default); any properties (such as
width and speed) set here are then adopted by the activities defined from then on, if they do not
themselves explicitly define those properties. After an activity has been declared with define,
the following properties may be assigned:

pixmap xpmfile
The file containing the image data for the activity. Note that you may not set a default pixmap.

width width
The width of each frame of the animation in pixels.

height height
The height of each frame of the animation in pixels.

frames frames
The number of frames in the animation.

directions directions
The number of directions for the activity (can be 1 or 2).

speed speed
The initial speed of the toon when engaged in this activity, in pixels per frame.

acceleration acceleration
The rate at which the speed increases, in pixels per frame squared. This property is not utilised
by all activities.

terminal_velocity terminal_velocity
The maximum speed in pixels per frame, again not utilised by all activities.

loop loop
Only understood by the actions; indicates how many times to repeat the action. If negative, then
the probility of stopping the action every time the action is complete is -1/loop.

Some notes regarding the various activities. If you design a new theme, feel free to make the splatted,
squashed, zapped and exit animations as gory and bloody as you like, but please keep the explosion
activity nice and tame; that way those of a nervous disposition can employ the --no-blood option which
replaces all these violent deaths with a tasteful explosion that wouldn't offend your grandmother. Xpm
images files are a factor of two smaller if you can limit the number of colours in the image such that
only one character need be used to represent each colour; this also makes XPenguins start up much more
rapidly. Rarely are more than 64 colours required.

So that's about it for the config file, now for the about file. This is very simple. Again comments are
initialised by a #. An entry consists of a key at the start of a line, followed by the corresponding
value which is read up to the next newline. The following keys are understood, although none are
compulsory.

artist Used to list the artist(s) who created the original images.

maintainer
The person who compiled the images into an XPenguins theme. It is useful if an email address can
also be provided.

date The date when the theme was last modified. My preferred format is day of the month, name of the
month in english, full year. For example: 24 April 2001.

icon The name of an image file that can be used as an icon for the theme; XPM and PNG are suitable
formats.

license The name of the license under which the theme is distributed (e.g. GPL).

comment Any other essential information, such as the theme's web site, as brief as possible.

Please test any about files you create by looking at how the information is displayed by the
xpenguins_applet program.

AUTHOR

       Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk>.

CREDITS

       Inspiration provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of the classic xsnow.  Most penguin images
       were taken from Pingus, a free lemmings clone that  can  be  found  at  <http://pingus.seul.org/>;  these
       images  were  designed  by  Joel  Fauche  <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr>  and Craig Timpany <timpany@es.co.nz>.
       Additional images in version 2 by Rob Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com> and Robin Hogan.

NOTES

       XPenguins can load an X server and/or network (although the CPU time used  is  small),  and  if  a  large
       number of penguins are spawned then they may begin to flicker, depending on the speed of the X server.

       The xpenguins homepage is located at:

       version < 3.0: http://xpenguins.seul.org/

       version         >=         3.0:         https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/software/xpenguins         and
       https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpenguins/

BUGS

       If there are icons drawn on the root window then the toons will erase them  when  they  walk  over  them,
       although an expose event will be sent to the window every second to redraw them.

       Since  version 3.0, xpenguins uses, if possible,  a transparent, click-through window to draw it's toons.
       The --squish flag does not function in this mode.

       The behaviour of the menu is not well defined when the same theme name is used more than once.

FILES

       User defined themes: $HOME/.xpenguins/themes/*
       System themes: /usr/local/share/xpenguins/themes/*
       Remember used flags: $HOME/.xpenguinsrc
       /proc/loadavg