Xplanet in KDE4 howto

[NialM]

Hi all,

Well... I know it is not the newest application, but I still love xplanet. Last night I got it working on my KDE4.

I created a folder in my home dir called xplanet-img.

I wrote a script with the following line in it:

#/bin/bash

xplanet -window -geometry 1680x1050 --num_times 1 --lon 300 --lat 15 --radius 40 --range 10 --output ~/xplanet-img/pic.jpg && mv ~/xplanet-img/pic.jpg ~/xplanet-img/xplanet.jpg

This will gen a new image and replace the old one with it.

Then I call the script from cron every 5 min.

Next.... in my desktop settings I choose slide show for the background and point to the xplanet-img folder..... done.


More fun can be had by using the picture/slide show Plasmoid in the same way.
You can have various planets on different parts of your desktop... or add some variables to the script to change which planet is displayed randomly...

Will be playing with this some more when I get home from work today....
__________________

[NialM]

Re: Xplanet in KDE4 howto

There is probably a cleaner way to do this.... I do not claim to be a great scripter, but just for fun you can make it rotate with every update.......

#/bin/sh

num=`cat ~/Settings/xplanet/num.txt`


if [ $num -le 10 ]; then
lon=360
else
lon=$(($num-10))
fi


echo $lon > ~/Settings/xplanet/num.txt

xplanet -geometry 1680x1050 --num_times 1 --lon $lon --lat 15 --radius 40 --range 10 --output ~/Settings/xplanet/img/pic.jpg && mv ~/Settings/xplanet/img/pic.jpg ~/Settings/xplanet/img/xplanet.jpg

[KeithZG]

Re: Xplanet in KDE4 howto

Cool! On my laptop in KDE3.5 I always had XPlanet set up as the background, I hadn't tried yet with KDE4 but it's nice of you to do the legwork, thanks

[NialM]

Re: Xplanet in KDE4 howto

My pleasure!