pngphoon

This program is intended as an alternative to the great xphoon program (X PHase of mOON), which was written by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres and is available from: https://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.

Modern desktops have an advanced interface for programs to dynamically provide background images in png format. Alternatively they just track when the background image file has been changed. That is what this program was originally written for. Here is an example in full size. The image must have a width of at least 760 pixels 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").

And the image format is pronounced "ping", NOT "pee-en-gee". Wikipedia and Oxford's Dictionaries, you are just plain wrong. (Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Introduction.html, see "Pronunciation", at the bottom.)

Downloading:

• Download source code: pngphoon-1.3.tar.bz2 (Size: 67264; Date: 2021-12-20, 11:27 CET)
• Debian/Ubuntu build config: pngphoon_1.3-0svolli1.debian.tar.xz (Size: 4896; Date: 2021-12-18, 22:33 CET)
• Windows binary: pngphoon-1.3-win32.zip (Size: 159282; Date: 2021-12-21, 23:47 CET)

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 for most current desktops:

• several current desktops now get triggered automatically when the image file changes
• so a simple entry in crontab will do:

  # m h dom mon dow command
  0   *  *   *   *  /home/svolli/bin/run-pngphoon

• With run-pngphoon looking like this:

  #!/bin/sh
  readonly image="${HOME}/.local/moon.png"
  readonly dir="$(dirname "${image}")"
  [ -d "${dir}" ] || mkdir "${dir}"
  pngphoon -w 1920 -h 1080 -f "${image}"

  (you will most probably use slightly different parameters)

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:

• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217950
• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230480

I remember reading a statement in the bugtracker, that this will not be fixed in KDE 4.x, but is planned for KDE 5.x to be fixed...

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:

History:

2021-12-18:

Minor update (1.3).
Surprisingly I'm not the only one still using this software:
Lars Löfving provided two patches

• bugfix for star drawing routine
• new parameters for setting colors

Thanks, Lars!
Other changes include:

• fixed compiler warnings introduced with newer versions of gcc
• fixed memory leak in pngwrite.c discovered using valgrind
• added option for southern hemisphere rotating the image 180 degrees, inspired by the readme of xphoon

2015-02-12:

Noticed that the last update wasn't put online, whoops!
The official debian-package is now "orphan". Can anyone tell me how to notify them of this update?

2014-09-14:

Minor update (1.2), with two bugfixes:

• A problem in the drawing algorithm, causing edges not been shaded correctly, has been fixed.
• If the moon does not fit in height, only the central section is exported in the png, while the image is drawn internally in the height of the moon.

2010-03-12:

Updated info about KDE.

2009-02-16:

Minor update (1.1), 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 (1.0), 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.

Contact information