Cher's Linux Hacks

KDE Hacks

Using a screensaver as desktop background

If you, like me, don't need your desktop, you can use it for funnier things - like running a screensaver in the background of your transparent windows. Yes, that's possible. And it's simple.

Selecting the tools

We need:

xwininfo

This little program can tell us quite a lot about the window structure of an X-Server. In this example we will simply reuse the window of the KDE Desktop, and xwininfo helps us finding it.

grep

The "swiss hacker text finder". We will use it to find, amongst all the printout of xwininfo, the line of text that we need.

sed

The "swiss hacker text changer". We will use it to cut out the part that we want.

That's how it works

keuphoria.kss -window-id $(xwininfo -root -all -int | grep "KDE Desktop" | sed 's/^ *\([0-9]*\) .*/\1/') &

This little command line will lookup the window id of the KDE Desktop using xwininfo, prepare the id for reuse with grep and sed and then pass it as the desired window id to keuphoria.kss. In the end, it replaced your normal KDE Desktop with the screensaver KEuphoria, thus running that screensaver as your desktop background.

And that's how it looks like

(Resolution: 2560×1280, size: )