bgrot
A program to prevent background boredom
Summary
bgrot is a suite of scripts I wrote on a whim. It takes a set of pictures, and rotates your background through them in random order. That's about it...
This program requires, among other things, perl 5 and xv.
bgrot V2 is currently in the works. It involves a complete rewrite into C, allows handling of multiple lists, lots of on-the-fly manipulation, real-time monitoring, and so forth. If you have any comments or ideas for it, email them to me.
News flash! The third pre-release snapshot of bgrot V2 is now available! Though this is still very early and very beta, I'm using it for my background rotation now. While it doesn't have any real major improvements over V1 (though it does allow randomized intervals), it doesn't seem to have any regressions either, and appears bug-free. Of course, I wouldn't dare call it such, but it seems to work for me. See the README and RELNOTES and similar files in the distribution for more information.
This version fixes up the infamous (to me, anyway) clumping problem, which was caused by some pecularities in the way we use randomization routines. It also cleaned up some somewhat questional code and rearchitected a few things in anticipation of writing some client interfaces. I've been running this code for about a month now, and it's kept running and not leaking memory.
bgrot V2 requires, in addition to xv as always, libxml2 and a pthreads implementation.
Current version
The current release of bgrot is V1.30. This is probably going to be the last release on the 1.x line, because there's just nothing more to DO to it. We've pretty much reached the rational limits of its functionality, and frankly, I don't need anything it doesn't do. The whole 2.x rewrite is mainly just an exercise for shits&giggles.
But that aside, the current pre-release snapshot is V2.-1, 2005-05-10. Please, please, please email me any nits or bugs or anything else that you find in this. I'm doing what I can to develop it, but I can only work with what I want and can find and fix.
Archived versions
Older versions of bgrot are available, for no reason other than posterity.
- V2.-1, 2003-04-11. was the second v2 snapshot posted.
- V2.-1, 2003-03-10 was the first v2 snapshot posted. It's got a memory leak in it, which mysteriously disappeared in newer ones. Oh well.
- Get V1.20, the first wide-spread release.
- You don't want V1.10, it's broken badly.
- Get V1.00, the first full release.
- Get V0.10, if for some reason you want an old beta.