XPenguins(1)XPenguins(1)NAMExpenguins - cute little penguins that walk along the tops of your win‐
dows
SYNOPSISxpenguins [-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. If
you send the program an interupt signal (such as by hitting Ctrl-C)
they will burst. 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.
-i, --theme-info
Print out the auxiliary information about a theme and
exit. Use the -t option to select the theme to describe.
-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 256.
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.
-t theme, --theme theme
Use the named theme. The default is Penguins. If the
theme has spaces in its name then you can use under‐
scores 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 interupt 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 fore‐
most 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 look‐
ing in /proc/loadavg, so this option only works under
unices that implement this particular pseudo file (prob‐
ably just Linux). When there are no toons on the screen,
XPenguins uses only a miniscule 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/xpen‐
guins/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 princi‐
pally 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/Pen‐
guins/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 horizon‐
tally. 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 millisec‐
onds.
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, tum‐
bler, 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 explic‐
itly 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 pro‐
vided.
date The date when the theme was last modified. My preferred
format is day of the month, name of the month in eng‐
lish, 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 dis‐
tributed (e.g. GPL).
copyright
The year and holder of the copyright.
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 Pin‐
gus, a free lemmings clone that can be found at <http://pin‐
gus.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@planetdes‐
cent.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:
http://xpenguins.seul.org/
BUGS
A new feature since version 2.1 is the ability to draw to win‐
dows other than the root window in situations where the window
manager or desktop environment places a large window over the
root window that would otherwise obscure the toons. Currently
XPenguins can draw to the KDE Desktop (KDE 2.0 and 2.1),
Enlightenment desktops greater than 0 (E16), the Nautilus desk‐
top and the virtual root window of certain window managers like
amiwm. Of course, simpler window managers that don't mess
around like this will still work (sawfish, blackbox and count‐
less others). It cannot work with CDE and probably never will.
Future versions of KDE, Enlightenment and Nautilus may not work;
the classic symptom of this is that XPenguins sits there as if
it's doing something, but no toons are visible. If this happens,
try running the program with one of the simpler window manager
listed above, or visit the XPenguins web site and download the
latest version. 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 100 frames to
redraw them.
FILES
$HOME/.xpenguins/themes/*
/usr/share/xpenguins/themes/*
/proc/loadavg
SEE ALSOxsnow(1), xroach(1), xwininfo(1)pingus(6)XPenguins 2.2 1 October 2001 XPenguins(1)
