[wp_campaign_2I am the type of person that will change my desktop background image VERY often because I feel that the image never really fits.
Suddenly, I remembered that I'd used electricsheep a couple of years ago, and that it makes some pretty funky pictures, and I also remembered something about a commandline switch, to specify which window the rendering of said funky picture should be in. So I installed it.
sudo aptitude install electricsheep
When it finished installing, I read the man page, and found the –root switch, which would render on the root window. I tried running electricsheep --root but nothing appeared on my desktop.
Of course, there is a way around this. electricsheep got a -window-id switch that is used by XScreensaver. Using this switch, I managed to get the rendering on the desktop. This simple command will start electricsheep and make it render psycedelic pictures right on your desktop.
electricsheep -window-id $(xwininfo -name Skrivebord | grep 'Window id' | cut -f4 -d\ )
If you’d like to use this, your desktop window isn’t named Skrivebord (danish for desktop), use the command xwininfo and click on your desktop. It should give output like this:
bredsaal@semtex:~$ xwininfo
xwininfo: Please select the window about which you
would like information by clicking the
mouse in that window.
xwininfo: Window id: 0x1600003 "Skrivebord"
Absolute upper-left X: 0
Absolute upper-left Y: 0
Relative upper-left X: 0
Relative upper-left Y: 0
Width: 1792
Height: 1344
Depth: 24
Visual Class: TrueColor
Border width: 0
Class: InputOutput
Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
Bit Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
Backing Store State: NotUseful
Save Under State: no
Map State: IsViewable
Override Redirect State: no
Corners: +0+0 -0+0 -0-0 +0-0
-geometry 1792x1344+0+0
Of course, in the above, Skrivebord is the name of the desktop.
You should really try it out to fully apreciate the niceness.
Related posts:
- Torchlight under Wine on Ubuntu 9.10
- Making a mosaic using metapixel
- Reading logfiles on OpenWrt
- Downloading YouTube videos using Debian or Ubuntu
- Lexmark X1180 in xubuntu
Tags: electricsheep, hack, linux, xubuntu
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Hi! Ive been surfing the WWW trying to find somehow to use electric sheep as a Background. Your blog seems to explain it, but, it won’t work for me. Im runing Fedora 12, with gnome… I tried to run this code:
electricsheep -window-id $(xwininfo -name x-nautilus-desktop | grep ‘Window id’ | cut -f4 -d )
but it won’t work..
I get this messg:
cut: option requires an argument — ‘d’
Try `cut –help’ for more information.
no argument to -window-id
..
do you think you can help me?
Hi Francisco.
For some unknown reason, my blog “ate” a backslash and I didn’t notice. The correct command for you is:
electricsheep -window-id $(xwininfo -name x-nautilus-desktop | grep ‘Window id’ | cut -f4 -d\ )I hope that helps.
I’ve tried using that same command on my laptop and it comes back with
[avi @ 0x80a2a30]max_analyze_duration reachedand never renders a single frame to my desktop… I’m using the exact command that has been fixed for english localeselectricsheep -window-id $(xwininfo -name x-nautilus-desktop | grep ‘Window id’ | cut -f4 -d\ )any suggestions? I’m running Gentoo with the Gnome 2.28.2
Hi Mick.
Without being sure, I think that it has something to do with libavformat. I don’t know what the solution would be, though. Maybe you should file a bug on launchpad?