A long time ago I was messing with xscreensaver and found you could paint the root window — the desktop — with a screensaver, and use it like an animated wallpaper image.
Most of those were fun for about 10 minutes, but then started to hurt my eyes … especially the 3D ones. I must be a wimp.
But there were a few I liked, and popsquares was one of them. That’s the one that throws up a series of blue squares and they fade between colors. It’s kind of neat.
I was experimenting with them on the Thinkpad today, and this time I set popsquares to use Tango colors, which gives it a more Clearlooks-esque color sequence.
Add this to your .xinitrc file for the same effect.
/usr/lib/xscreensaver/popsquares -root -bg "#3465a4" -fg "#729fcf" -ncolors 128
(That’s in Arch, by the way. But I think the xscreensavers should be in the same place in Ubuntu too. Other shades of Linux probably can do that too, maybe with a little path adjustment.) I used the ncolors flag because otherwise the colors seem to fade too fast, and it doesn’t have a retro effect.
There are other flags too; experiment with colors and shades and see what you come up with.
Interesting, but… is this Gnome? KDE? XFCE? It looks a bit GNOMEy to me but I thought Arch was a KDE distro…
Openbox only! Audacious and rxvt-unicode in the photo.
Mmmmmm…..Groove Salad! Yum!
Nice! I tried to do this from within KDE but I failed miserably. Oh well.
Really? KDE must handle the desktop differently. But then again, I don’t even know if Gnome will do this. It might be a WM-only trick. I hadn’t thought about that. …
in KDE one can do that with the KDE background.
right click on Desktop -> Desktop Settings -> Background -> Advanced
Then use “Use this program to draw background” and enter the command above.
It works partly – until the normal screen saver kicks in or you logged out or you went to standby – don’t know how to reactivate it again.
And you don’t see your desktop icons…
@likeatim – yup, that’s what I was trying but it didn’t work at all. I tried popsquares and glmatrix but they just refused to paint on the root window. Oh well…
It’s because the desktop enviroments paint over the root window with their file managers.