XPENGUINS - cool little penguins walking along the tops of your windows
Copyright (C) 1999-2001  Robin Hogan
Latest version: 2.0 (6 May 2001)


INTRODUCTION

XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your
root window. By default it will be penguins - they fall from the top
of the screen, walk along the top of windows, up the side of windows
and do various other stuff. Other themes in the base package are
"Classic Penguins", reproducing XPenguins version 1.2, and "Turtles".
More themes can be downloaded from the XPenguins web site
(http://xpenguins.seul.org/). 

To run, type "xpenguins". Type "xpenguins --help" to see the available
options, or read the man page (type "man xpenguins"). If you want to
make your own theme, read the THEMES section of the man page and have
a look at the config file for the default theme (which is usually
installed in /usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config). You may
also find the gimp script "lay-out-frames.scm" useful - it lays out
the frames of an animated gif side by side in a way that can be used
by xpenguins.


INSTALLATION

Do the following:

	./configure
	make
	make install (as root)

By default everything will be installed in /usr/local. Use
"./configure --prefix=/usr" (or similar) to install it somewhere
else. For more information, read the INSTALL file, or type "./configre
--help". If you have problems with the make process then try using
"gmake" instead of "make".


LICENSE

This program is released under the GNU public license - see the
COPYING file. This license applies to everything in the base
distribution, including the themes "Penguins", "Classic Penguins" and
"Turtles".


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

"The program is running but I can't see any penguins. Why?"

"Are you running KDE (the K Desktop Environment) or CDE (the Common
Desktop Environment)?"

"Yes."

"KDE 2 and CDE both put a big X window over the root window. The
penguins are there on the root window, but they're obscured by the
window above. Some users have had a similar problem with KDE 1.2 and
Enlightenment (desktops greater than 0). In principle one could simply
draw to this other window (if its window ID can be found), but
preliminary investigation suggests that other problems would arise,
notably that KDE draws its icons on the desktop window, which the
penguins would erase as they walked over them. If you want to try
to solve the problem then the source file to edit is src/toon_root.c.
Otherwise, try a simpler window manager like sawfish or blackbox."


TODO

Add themability to the XPenguins GNOME applet.
Allow xpenguins to draw to windows other than the root window.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Inspiration was provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of
the classic "xsnow".

Most of the penguin images were taken from "Pingus", a free lemmings
clone for Linux (http://pingus.seul.org/), and were designed by Joel
Fauche <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and Craig Timpany
<timpany@es.co.nz>. Rob Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com> provided
some new penguin images now used in the default theme.


AUTHOR

Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk>

The xpenguins homepage is located at http://xpenguins.seul.org/


SEE ALSO

Michael Vines <isamu@neomueller.org> has rewritten the program (as of
version 1.1) for Microsoft Windows and called it "WinPenguins" -
visit http://neomueller.org/~isamu/winpenguins/ 

