Xplanet 0.90

1) How can I use the automatically generated cloud images?
2) How do I get xplanet working with KDE2?
3) How do I get rid of that silly smiley face?

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1) How can I use the automatically generated cloud images?
				   
Edit the updateclouds script
(http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/updateclouds) to fit your needs.  You
can run it as a cron job to automatically update your earth maps.
Here's my crontab entry, which updates the cloud map at 6:30 and 12:30
every weekday.

30 6,12 * * 1-5 /home/hari/local/share/updateclouds >> /home/hari/log/updateclouds 2>&1

If you're a unix user and are unfamiliar with cron, check the man
pages for cron and crontab.  Also take a look at the other contributed
scripts on the Xplanet web page.

Windows users can run the updateclouds.bat script
(http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/windows/updateclouds.bat).  Again,
modify it to fit your needs.  I've heard you can use the "at" command
in windows to schedule its execution ('help at' in a console for more
info). If you get it working, please let me know the details.

2) How do I get xplanet working with KDE2?

From: Joe Mirando <jmirando@portone.com>

      - Right-click on the desktop and select "Configure
        background..."  from the resulting menu.

      - Click on the menu list next to "Mode:" and select "Background
        Program".

      - Now click on the "Setup" button and then the "Add" button.
        Fill in the fields with the appropriate information. For
        instance, the setup I use to display a picture of Mars on my
        first desktop contains the following information:

	      Name             Xplanet-Mars
	      Comment          v0.73 by Hari Nair
	      Command          xplanet -image mars.jpg -radius 47 -center 550,368 -output marsdesk.jpg
	      Preview cmd      xplanet -image mars.jpg -radius 47 -center 550,368 -output marsdesk.jpg
	      Executable       xplanet
	      Refresh time     5 minutes

	- Now click on "Okay" to save the setup.  This allows KDE to
          use XPlanet to create a picture every five minutes. Now all
          you need to do is tell KDE what picture to use.

	- Go back to the main background configuration menu (the one
	  that lists the desktops and has the "Background",
	  "Wallpaper", and "Advanced" buttons) and click the
	  "Wallpaper" button.

	- Put a check mark in the "Multiple" box and click on the
          "Setup" button. This will give you a menu that allows you to
          select pictures to display on the desktop. We only want to
          display one picture here, but we want it to update every
          so-often.

        - Since we've told XPlanet to update every five minutes, we'll
          select "5 minutes" as our interval here as well. Now all we
          need is to select the picture that XPlanet is going to
          create for us.

        - Click on the "Add" button and select the picture that
          XPlanet has written. (Since we've already executed XPlanet
          by installing it in the previous steps, it should have
          already written the picture file) and click on "OK".

        - You can elect to have this picture used for each desktop (by
          selecting "Common Background"), use XPlanet for some
          desktops and not others, or you may follow the preceeding
          steps to create a different background for each
          desktop. This is how I configured my desktops, and
          everything works fine.


3) How do I get rid of that silly smiley face?

Look at the marker file for the earth.  The last line reads

position=sun image=smile.png transparent={255,255,255}

Comment it out by putting a # at the beginning of the line.

Hari Nair
hari@alumni.caltech.edu
