WELCOME
Welcome to Deskroot, a tool for displaying images and HTML (only images right now) on your desktop/root window.
INSTALLATION
To install, edit the Makefile and type "make". This should create an executable called "deskroot". Install it using "make install".
CONFIGURATION
Create a directory "~/.deskroot" where the configuration file will be stored.
Next edit ~/.deskroot/deskroot.conf to set up the images to be displayed. Right now only file:// URLs are supported. Here is an example:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<deskroot>
<image>
<url>file:///home/jsdkl/.deskroot/weather.jpg</url>
<width>321</width>
<height>424</height>
<xloc>0</xloc>
<yloc>0</yloc>
</image>
</deskroot>
Save, then run deskroot. deskroot will create an image called deskroot.jpg in the .deskroot directory. This image is suitable for setting as your background image using xv or similar programs. Read below for more info.
OTHER URL TYPES
Deskroot only supports file:// urls at this point. To work around that you can use lynx, wget or some other url retriever in a script. Mine looks like:
#!/bin/sh
wget -O /home/jsdkl/.deskroot/weather.jpg http://image.weather.com/web/radar/us_htl_closeradar_large_usen.jpg wget -O /home/jsdkl/.deskroot/nmucam.jpg http://www.acs.nmu.edu/ac_info/academic.jpg wget -O /home/jsdkl/.deskroot/scipic.jpg http://www.sciencedaily.com/gallery/picoftheday.jpg
This script or the individual commands could be run by cron to retrieve the images, then run deskroot and update the desktop for you.
NAUTILUS PROBLEMS
For users running Nautilus as their desktop manager, things get tricky. Here's the command line to set the background to the newly created deskroot.jpg image:
background-properties-capplet --init-session-settings -b ~/.deskroot/deskroot.jpg
Unfortunately, Nautilus will not reread the image if called again. To get the image to change you must manually change or reset the background, then call background-properties-capplet again. If you know an easier way, please let me know!
WEB SITE
Please visit the web site (http://deskroot.sourceforge.net/) and consider contributing to the project. Feel free to email me (rhenry@vistatheater.org) if you have any questions or would like to help out.
Ryan