deskTOPia: The hsetroot and Esetroot Background Tools
BACKGROUND VIEW
Users who work long hours on a
desktop computer will appreciate
something eye-catching to relieve
the monotony. The hsetroot and
Esetroot tools offer you more than
an ordinary desktop.
Long gone, and rightfully so, are
the days when Windows experts
used to sell their users on wallpaper
stripping as a top secret tuning tip.
Modern computers have more than
enough memory for a desktop background.
And in contrast to Windows 95,
most window managers in the Linux
world can handle graphics in compressed
and thus smaller formats such
as PNG or JPG.
Desktop environments typically have a
preferences dialog where users can
select a wallpaper. More basic window
managers may expect you to store background
images in a specific directory, or
even to point to the image in a configuration
file. Command-line programs that
load a background image remove these
restrictions. In this month’s article, we
will be looking at two applications that
offer you more than just the ability to
paint a picture in the root window: Esetroot
[1] and hsetroot [2].
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