pngphoon

This program 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 is what is program was originally written for. Here is an example. The image size must be 760x760 or bigger to place the moon. If the image is 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 3.x:

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

Setting up pngphoon for KDE 4.x:

This cannot be done yet. There are two bugs filed about this problem:

Setting up pngphoon for Gnome 2.x:

create a small shell script that creates the image and updates gconf like this:

#!/bin/sh
image=$HOME/.gnome2/share/images/moon.png
pngphoon -w <x-resolution> -h <y-resolution> -f "$image"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "$image"

run this script on login
and/or
run this script as a cronjob

Setting up pngphoon for Mac OS X:

I just don't know. I tried to set it up, but failed. If you know how it's done, please let me know, so I can update this page.

If you've got knowledge on how to set the background image on any other desktop, please drop me an email: svolli.svolli.de (lame spam protection, replace the first "." with "@").

History:

2010-03-12:

Updated info about KDE.

2009-02-16:

Minor update, with two bugfixes:

If a mandatory parameter is missing, the program will exit with a message, instead of crashing after a message.
When the width was not a multiple of 8 both moon and stars were not drawn correctly.

2008-11-02:

Added Gnome setup info.

2008-01-15:

Minor update, with only two new features:

a filename of "-" (without the quotes) can be used for stdout
pngphoon now has a version number :-)

A Windows binary is now also provided.

2006-01-09:

Initial release.

Download source code: pngphoon-1.1.tar.bz2 (Size: 66369; Date: 2009-02-16, 14:31 CET)
Windows binary: pngphoon-1.1-win32.zip (Size: 110014; Date: 2009-02-16, 14:35 CET)

Contact information

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