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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.

Current version

The current release of bgrot is 1.31. This release was done mainly to tweak a few things in the build system and make things easier for FreeBSD ports.

This is almost certainly going to be the last release on the 1.x line, because there's just nothing more to DO to it. There was a 2.x experiment archived below for posterity, but it was abandoned because it was a stupid thing to do. There are vague plans for a 3.x rewrite to clean up the silliness in how it works and possibly allow some of the extensions v2 originally envisioned, but I don't know when or if it'll happen.

Archived versions

Older versions of bgrot are available, for no reason other than posterity.

  • 1.30 fixed up some stuff with directory walking, more gracefully handled missing files, and a few other tweaks. It was the current version for more than a decade.
  • 1.20 was the first wide-spread release.
  • You don't want 1.10, it's broken badly.
  • Get 1.00 was the first full release.
  • 0.10, was a really old beta. I don't know why you'd want it.

v2 experiment

bgrot v2 was a rewrite into C aiming at various expanded features, like handling of multiple lists, lots of on-the-fly manipulation, real-time monitoring, and so forth. It's been abandoned for various reasons; at some point a v3 will be restarted. But here's the v2 stuff in case anyone cares for some reason.

bgrot V2 requires, in addition to xv as always, libxml2 and a pthreads implementation.

  • The last v2 snapshot is V2.-1, 2005-05-10. 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 questionable code and rearchitected a few things in anticipation of writing some client interfaces.
  • 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.