pngphoon 2006-01-09 review

pngphoon project is intended as a successor to the great xphoon program (X PHase of mOON), which was written by Jef Poskanzer and Cra

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 64K Developer: SvOlli

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pngphoon project is intended as a successor to the great xphoon program (X PHase of mOON), which was written by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres and is available from: http://www.acme.com/software/xphoon/. xphoon is a program that displays the actual phase of the moon on the X11 root window.

Nowadays all desktop systems like KDE hide the X11 rootwindow with an own background image, so xphoon could paint as much in the root window as it likes to, but nothing was to been seen.

KDE has an advanced interface for programs to dynamically provide background images in png format. That's what is program was originally written for. Here's an example. The image size must be 760x760 or bigger to place the moon. If it's smaller just the stars will be drawn. And by the way: it is pronounced "pingphoon" (like "typhoon").

Compiling:

necessary are only a C compiler and
the development files of the png library (png.h and libpng.so or .a and their dependencies of cause)
a simple "make" should create the binary.

Setting up pngphoon for KDE:

assuming that the binary has been copied to /usr/local/bin/pngphoon
select configure desktop
bring up the advanced options dialog
check "Use the following program for drawing the background"
click add and fill out the form like this:
Name: pngphoon
Comment: Phase of moon
Command: /usr/local/bin/pngphoon -w %x -h %y -f %f
Preview Cmd: /usr/local/bin/pngphoon -w %x -h %y -f %f
Executable: /usr/local/bin/pngphoon
Refresh Time: 60 min
click "OK" on everything you opened

Requirements:
libpng