Putting a picture in the background

If you work on an X Window workstation, you can place an image of your choosing on the background, or root window.

To load a picture onto the background use the command

xloadimage -onroot picture_name

where picture_name is the name or the path and name of the picture you want to display.

For example, typing the command

xloadimage -onroot /afs/eos.ncsu.edu/project/goodies/graphics/bitmaps/moon.xbm.Z

will load a black and white picture of the moon onto the background. There are several black and white pictures in the /bitmaps directory for your use, and there are many thousands available from various Internet sources.

Note that although the ".Z" extension on the file "moon.xbm.Z" indicates that the file has been compressed, the xloadimage command will automatically uncompress the image for display.

Automatically loading a background picture at startup

First, find a picture you like by using the xloadimage command as outlined above. To make the image load at startup, place the xloadimage command in your ".Xstartup" file, followed by an ampersand (&) to place the process in the background. If you don't have a file called ".Xstartup", you can make one using an editor.

For example, to load the moon image automatically, your ".Xstartup" file should contain the line

xloadimage -onroot /afs/eos.ncsu.edu/project/goodies/graphics/bitmaps/moon.xbm.Z &

Don't forget the ampersand at the end!

If your picture is too small to fill the screen, just include the -fullscreen option and your picture will be zoomed to fit the size of the screen you're currently on. For example, the command

xloadimage -onroot -fullscreen /afs/eos.ncsu.edu/project/goodies/graphics/raster_images/bulwnk.gif &

would enlarge the file "bulwnk.gif" to fit the screen and then load it onto the root window.

Last modified June 15, 2005 by cawalker