[MacGorilla]

When you use Apple's X11 in full screen mode, you get a plain gray background, is there anyway to change this?

[Arkham_c]

Sure. You just need to use xsetroot.


xsetroot -solid blue


That would set the background to blue. If you wanted to set it to a picture:

xsetroot -bitmap somefile.xbm

The picture has to be in "X-bitmap" format. You can use GraphicConverter to convert to this format.

[pwolfe1]

if you have eterm installed, you should be able to do:

esetroot /path/to/blahblah.jpg

[MacGorilla]

xsetroot works but the only bitmaps it will load are XPMs which only support black and white and I don't mean like a black and white photograph, more like a chess board.

I don't eterm installed but I may try it out.

[Zim]

Haven't tried this with Mac OSX, but when I was on Solaris, I would always use

xv -root -quit -rmode 5 $HOME/pic.jpg

(using xv, which I do know works under OS X).

I had this command in my .xinitrc.

Mike

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by Zim:
Haven't tried this with Mac OSX, but when I was on Solaris, I would always use

xv -root -quit -rmode 5 $HOME/pic.jpg

(using xv, which I do know works under OS X).

I had this command in my .xinitrc.

Mike

That would work, but xv is not included with OSX.

If you have the developer tools, you can download the source here and compile it:

http://www.trilon.com/xv/downloads.html#src-distrib

I didn't suggest that because (1) it was not included, and (2) the source does not compile cleanly on OSX.

[Zim]

It was May 16, 2002 that I compiled xv (no idea what version of 10.x we were on then), but I don't recall having much trouble getting it to compile. Not saying it was zero problems, only point being that if *I* can do it, most other people here can prob stumble thru it too (that's a statement of me not being the best at compiling packages).

Anyway, just one option. XV has multiple modes of root display, it can center, stretch, tile/repeat, etc. I used that in conjunction with fvwm as my window manager for years at work.

Cheers,
Mike

[MacGorilla]

Originally posted by Zim:
Haven't tried this with Mac OSX, but when I was on Solaris, I would always use

xv -root -quit -rmode 5 $HOME/pic.jpg

(using xv, which I do know works under OS X).

I had this command in my .xinitrc.

Mike

I have xv installed via fink and this command works great! Thanks for the tip.

[leffo]

And if you run X11 in root-less mode and want to use an X11 applications transparent features (like running xchat with a transparent background, for example) setting the X11 background to whatever you have as your OS X background works great, as shown here.