Version 2.3.5:
* Lowered some paddings on the view and display tabs to get more space and
  prevent the UI from breaking with different themes

I’m asking myself if it doesn’t catch nobodies eye that faders are slipping behind buttons or why I don’t know things like Ubuntu 11.04 is breaking on wallpaper changes…

Dear users of xplanetFX – you don’t have to register, you don’t have to go through endless bug reporting processes, you not event have to state your real email address – just drop me a line in the comments if you’re experiencing flaws and I will see what I can do for you. Thank you very much in advance!

Pyllinux wanted to see the NASA Blue Marble Collection as monthly textures on his xplanetFX desktop. If you want to get an impression please take a look here.

So here’s a script to set up everything needed to change xplanetFX’s textures to the NASA series.

• Right click the link and choose “save as…”
• Make the file executable
• If you want: Edit the first ### CONFIGIURATION ### section with a text editor to fit your needs (shouldn’t be necessary)
• Put an entry in your autostart configuration or set up a cronjob

To see if the setup is downloading everything you may want to run it from a terminal once.

Functionality

After the first run a new hidden folder exists in your home directory called .NASA-blue-marble-collection. This one holds all of the downloaded files and some update information. The standard configuration also uses a new topography image and the NASA night map from the NASA (which can be disabled in the configuration section).

Everytime the script runs it looks if you have installed a new template (or overwritten the earth texture in any other way) or if the month changed since the last update. If so, it takes the image for the actual month, resizes it to xplanetFX’s resolution and stores it in the right place to be used by xplanetFX. The same is done with topography and night map if you enabled them (default is on, leave empty if you don’t want to use them).

The images aren’t taken from the NASA server (because it rejects download tries from scripts and blocks your IP for a couple of minutes afterwards) but from other servers found on the internet hosting this stuff. If they’re down search your fav search engine for the filenames (not the complete URL’s) from the configuration section.

The files are downloaded once with the first run of the script. You may want to force a complete refresh, then use the option -r or –refresh to delete all files related to this thing and start all over (It will not destroy anything in xplanetFX but will remove its folder completely – so don’t place the script in .NASA-blue-marble-collection!). If you want to force the update of the textures use -f or –force to rewrite xplanetFX’s textures, no matter what the latest update information says.

Hint

This script can be used for other purposes, too. Just take a look in the configuration section on the top of the script to change resolution, target file to write to or stuff like that. If you want to use them as your desktop wallpaper you may want to append the little “^” sign to the resolution setting which means that imagemagick keeps the ratio of the image and doesn’t destroy them, for example “1280×960^”

Please…

…do not hammer down the servers (with -r). There are enough problems with clouds images and stuff so we don’t need more problems with earth textures atm ,) and note: the images are of 2007 – there are no updates. So a simple one-time-setup per machine should be enough.

This script was hacked in half an hour so there’s no guarantee at all ,) it was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 by now, please leave a short comment if you’re experiencing any problems or if you want to let the world know about a success on your particular system.

Update!

Since version 2.3.0 this feature is permanently built into xplanetFX and can be used via GUI and CLI.

Long ago I hacked a little script to create complete image series with xplanetFX. It can be downloaded from here: xplanetFX_series.

• Right click, “save as…”
• make the downloaded file executable
• open xplanetFX and stop the daemon
• do you desired settings like theme, resolution effects…
• set the “fixed date” option and set the date to the start of your series
• don’t forget to save the settings
• run the script

You can run the script with the default settings by simply double clicking it or open a terminal and enter:

[path to script]xplanetFX_series [path to target folder] [interval in seconds] [time range in seconds]

• If no target folder is given, the current working directory is chosen
• if no interval given it is 10 minutes (600 seconds)
• if there’s no duration 24h is used
• you can’t provide an interval without folder (yes it’s quick’n'dirty)
• you can’t provide the time range without interval and target folder (yes it REALLY is quick’n'dirty)

examples:

./xplanetFX_series ~/Backgrounds

Desktop/xplanetFX_series Desktop 1800

A simple double click results in:

[Pfad zum Script]/xplanetFX_series [Pfad zum Script] 600 86400

…and creates a bunch of images in the directory the script is lying over 24 hours with a gap of 10 minutes.

Needs Python and Zenity (or KDialog in KDE), default in Ubuntu. Kdialog can’t do progress bars and I don’t hack dcop-support so in KDE it’s kind of uncool. Everything else reports to the terminal.

This article is just a translation to english to get linked from the main xplanetFX page.

Perhaps someone wants to clarify “who” his machine really is ,)

techno-style ftw!!11

I added a new idea as a style to the Tron theme called “Plasma”. The colours of both styles doesn’t fit that well, don’t know by now if it bothers me that much. Although I think the death-star style moon looks funny I disabled it in the theme due to problems with the flashy overlay of the Plasma style.

Due to problems with the latest development version of Ubuntu (11.10) I had to change the package name of xplanetFX to xplanetfx. It doesn’t affect the program at all but may be a major change for your DEB package management. The first and ugliest effect you may encounter:

You possibly don’t get updates from the deb repository for xplanetFX anymore!

This just could happen, all tests worked flawlessly by now, so it seems aptitude gives a fuck for capitalization (and so do I ^^)

Just to be clear – the software hasn’t changed. The executable stays “xplanetFX”, the same counts for the folders, pixmaps etc.

If you’re encountering problems you have different options:

Simply install the new package

It doesn’t harm your system if you install the new package called “xplanetfx” and give a shite for the last version of xplanetFX. Since no new files or folders are installed there’s just a redundant entry in your aptitude waiting for updates ’till doomsday.

Uninstall xplanetFX first

If you are suffering from mania for cleanliness you could do “apt-get remove xplanetFX” first before you install the new package xplanetfx.  This will remove the entry xplanetFX from aptitude but shouldn’t change anything else.

Call 0800-mein-neues-blog.de for help .)

I would be happy if you report your problems in the comment section.

Addendum

I’ve done a lot of testing, but I don’t know how the new package will behave in the wild. So I’m really appreciating bugreports about problems! Tests on different Debians and Ubuntus didn’t show any flaws, the package management got it right by now. This counts for the DEB-repository and the deb packages installed via gdebi.

For example I was able to do an “apt-get install xplanetFX” on my Machine without a flaw, the same goes for uninstallation. So I don’t expect problems in the first place but one never knows… .)

Version 2.2.18:
* Bug with $USERDIR in daemon hitting while installing a fresh working place in
  /home
* Call the GUI via variable path (instead of absolute)

Version 2.2.15:
* New function: xplanetFX --random selects a random style and restarts a running
  xplanetFX afterwards
* Bug in install_template() in daemon: variable was set with $cor

I extracted the essential parts of “bulb” and draw new shadows to be more flexible in coloring the background. The result is an update for “bulb” you can easily get via the update wizard in the tools tab or the themepool directly.

Btw… the theme works best with orbit enabled at an angle of about -70 degrees.

Update: There was a tiny bug in the night style. If you downloaded within the first seconds it was online please reinstall via theme pool.