xstarfish: X wallpaper generator
Written by:
- Mars Saxman
With help from:
- Sebastien Loisel's 'zut'
- Adrian Bridgett
- Philip Derrin
- "other peoples"
Maintained by:
- Richard Wardin
"Starfish", with capitals, is a wallpaper generator program. "xstarfish" is the unix port of this program. Neither of these entities has any connection to "starfish", the xscreensaver hack. I regret the confusion.
Starfish generates colourful, tiled images using random numbers fed through mathematical functions. It does not use source image files, so it can generate its images nearly forever without running out of material.
Once it has created an image, Starfish applies it to the root window of your display as the background pixmap. Since Starfish images are seamlessly tiled, the pixmap will wrap around forming a "wallpaper" effect behind your windows. This allows you to customize your desktop, as often as you wish, with a new look and without much work.
There is no GUI control panel, but Starfish is quite simple to control on a command line. There are not many options. In fact you can run Starfish without any command line options at all:
xstarfish
This will generate a 256 pixel by 256 pixel wallpaper pattern. If you don't like it, simply run Starfish again and it will replace the old pattern.
Perhaps you have an older machine that runs slowly, or you don't like big bold patterns. You can instruct Starfish to create a smaller-than-normal pattern:
xstarfish --size small
Valid sizes are small, medium, large, and full. These sizes are all relative to the size of your screen, and they are all slightly randomized. While two "medium" patterns will be roughly similar, they are unlikely to come out exactly the same. "full" size, however, is always exactly the same size as your default screen.
If you really don't care how big the patterns are and you just want variety, use
xstarfish --size random
While Starfish will happily create a new desktop pattern any time you ask for one, the ultimate lazy person's solution is to run Starfish in "daemon mode". In this mode, Starfish will create patterns automatically at a time interval you determine. Perhaps you want a new pattern every day:
xstarfish --daemon 1 day
Or you are a real graphics junkie and you want Starfish to spit out patterns more rapidly:
xstarfish --daemon 30 seconds
Recognized time units are days, weeks, seconds, and minutes. When you run Starfish in daemon mode, it will appear to quit immediately, taking you back to the command line. This is an illusion; Starfish has merely put itself in the background and will continue to create new patterns indefinitely. You can shut it down with the standard "killall" command, like this:
killall xstarfish
Finally, you can direct Starfish to save its output as a PNG file instead of applying it to the X root window:
xstarfish --outfile wallpaper.png
These are the basics. For a complete listing of Starfish command line options, type
xstarfish --usage
This will print out a list of Starfish's options and what they do, but will not create a new pattern.
Starfish was originally written for the MacOS. The Mac source code is not included in this package.
Copyright (c) 1999,2000 by Mars Saxman.
Copyright (c) 1998 of the bits taken from zut by Sebastien Loisel.
Copyright (c) 2000 (makepng.c) by Philip Derrin.