Making waves with xdesktopwaves

WAVE RIDER

Article from Issue 56/2005
Author(s):

If even the most imaginative desktop background is starting to bore you, it’s time for a change. xdesktop waves allows you to change your desktop into a water scape. You can add rain and storms or just drag your mouse to liven things up.

Water attracts millions of holi day makers to the seaside, lakes, or rivers every year. Now, Oliver Hamann has developed a desktop tool to bring the wet look to the desktop. Oliver’s xdesktopwaves [1] pro gram floods your desktop and makes waves when you drag your mouse and move windows. The program gives you a variety of options that allow users to add effects such as rain and storms or to change the color of the water. There is no need to do without your favorite wallpaper – the waterscape that xdesk-topwaves gives you is transparent. Do-It-Yourself The application is available from the project homepage. There are no ready to-run packages, so you will need to build the program from the source code. All you need is the gcc compiler and the developer packages for the graphical sys tem. Many distributions call the required package XFree86-devel or xorg-devel. Unpack the xdesktopwaves-1.3.tar.gz archive and change to the directory that this step creates, xdesktopwaves-1.3. Then enter make to compile the pro gram. Become root, and then type make install to copy the program file to /usr/ X11R6/ bin and the manpage to /usr/ X11R6/ man/ man1.

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