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#1 2013-10-01 00:35:00

Multimoon
Member
From: /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern
Registered: 2012-09-30
Posts: 170

Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

Hey guys. I've got a Gnome 3.10 setup, and I would like to set a terminal as the root window so I can run cmatrix in said terminal. CMatrix is availible in the official repos, it is a simple program that recreates the 'Matrix' effect from the Matrix Movie. In essence, a live background. I assume it would be something along the lines of:

Disable the gnome shell's handling of the root window (The Background)
Run a terminal in the root window (Preferable something VERY light, xterm at the heaviest, a background wasting cpu power would be stupid.)
Run cmatrix in that terminal
Somehow lock off keyboard and mouse input to the root window, so you cant interact with the terminal and accedentally CNTRL-C cmatrix or click on the terminal, etc

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

--EDIT--
Running CMatrix may not be the ideal situation, it probably wastes a good deal of CPU power. If anyone knows any alternate ways to make a 'live' background that supports the Gnome Shell, I'de be happy to know about it. If I remember right, something exists for KDE, but not gnome.

Last edited by Multimoon (2013-10-01 00:39:09)


It always makes me laugh when people complain and rage over any distro's management ideal, when this is a linux community, and you could always make your own distro and experience the pains yourself.

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#2 2013-10-01 02:46:05

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

Multimoon wrote:

<snip>
Running CMatrix may not be the ideal situation, it probably wastes a good deal of CPU power.
<snip>

Sweet Jesus!  I was curious about this as I had also seen kmandla mention this on his blog.  So since it was in [community] I thought I would give it a quick go.  I have an Intel i5 3210m and it was using 5-6% cpu according to htop.

This is probably not a great thing to implement…  (nor do I have any idea where to begin).

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#3 2013-10-01 10:35:09

Multimoon
Member
From: /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern
Registered: 2012-09-30
Posts: 170

Re: Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

WonderWoofy wrote:
Multimoon wrote:

<snip>
Running CMatrix may not be the ideal situation, it probably wastes a good deal of CPU power.
<snip>

Sweet Jesus!  I was curious about this as I had also seen kmandla mention this on his blog.  So since it was in [community] I thought I would give it a quick go.  I have an Intel i5 3210m and it was using 5-6% cpu according to htop.

This is probably not a great thing to implement…  (nor do I have any idea where to begin).

Android and iOS manage to impliment this without using nearly any CPU power at all - On low powered ARM chips. I've heard of something for KDE that does this, 'dream' something, I cant remember the exact name. I imagine there has to be some live wallpaper thing out there for gnome, seems too unlikely that there isnt.


It always makes me laugh when people complain and rage over any distro's management ideal, when this is a linux community, and you could always make your own distro and experience the pains yourself.

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#4 2013-10-01 16:29:03

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

I imagine you are probably right, I was just commenting on the fact that the cmatrix program in itself is not very light on the cpu (for such functioanlity).  Making a terminal as the root window is probably a fine thing to do, but running that actual application would probably introduce more strain on the system that it should have in an idle state.  It makes me wonder about what kinds of consequences it has in terms of maintaining the ability for the processor to reach C-states…

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#5 2013-10-02 14:37:04

Multimoon
Member
From: /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern
Registered: 2012-09-30
Posts: 170

Re: Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

I found the KDE thing I was thinking of, its called DreamDesktop. Now to find a alternative for Gnome.


It always makes me laugh when people complain and rage over any distro's management ideal, when this is a linux community, and you could always make your own distro and experience the pains yourself.

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#6 2013-10-02 16:54:11

progandy
Member
Registered: 2012-05-17
Posts: 5,184

Re: Set a simple terminal as the root window in gnome

It should work with shantz-xwinwrap-bzr and glmatrix from xscreensaver with a command like. In my i3 setup it requires ~6% CPU power. (6% of one virtual core on a dualcore / hyperthreading quadcore intel core i3 in powersave profile = 933Mhz)

xwinwrap -ov -fs -- /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root -window-id WID

Edit: xmatrix with these settings runs with mostly less than 1% CPU

xwinwrap -ov -fs -- /tmp/xmatrix -delay 100000 -ascii -root -window-id WID

http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2008/09/03 … nwrap.html

Last edited by progandy (2013-10-02 17:07:03)


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