Using Your Own Customized Backgrounds

If you have a custom background image that you want to display, you can do soit if you turn off the display icons on the background and the desktop background tool. See the bgpaste(1) man page for details.

Below are a collection of steps to turn the desktop icons and background off and on as well as how to prepare and display your customized background image.

1. To display a custom background using bgpaste:

• Open an Icon View of your home directory by double-clicking the folder icon on your desktop, or by choosing "Home Directory" from the Desktop toolchest.
  • Choose "Hidden Files" from the View menu to see the "." files in your home directory.
  • Optionally just open a Unix shell window and type:
    • cd $HOME
• Open the directory named .desktop-<hostname> and create a file called nodesktop in that directory. This will turn off icons on the background.
  • Optionally just open a Unix shell window and type:
    • cd .desktop-$host
    • touch nodesktop
• Place the following line in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file in your home directory:
  • 4Dwm*SG_useBackgrounds: False
  • Use the command:
    • jot ~/.Xdefaults
    • then cut and paste the above line into the file and save it.
• Log out then log back in.

In any event, once you have the desktop background off, you can now install your own background using bgpaste.

• Note, the bgpaste requires an SGI RGB image file.
• To convert from some other format, use:
  • imgcopy myimage.format myimage.rgb
• Now, you can install that image as
  • bgpaste myimage.rgb

If these steps take you more than a minute to do, you are making it way too complicated. Nothing here can hurt anything on your system, if you type something wrong, it will simply be ignored.

To turn the desktop backgrounds back on:

• Remove the line
  • 4Dwm*SG_useBackgrounds: False
• from your ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources file.
  • Hint, insert a "!" in the to comment out this line.
• Log out and log back in.

To turn icons on the background back on:

• Delete the ~/.desktop-$host/nodesktop file.
  • The Unix command floowing will do this:
    • rm ~/.desktop-$host/nodesktop
• Log out and log back in.

Turning Desktop User Environment On and Off:

The above steps allow you to control desktop backgrounds on a per-user basis. If however, you wish to do this on a system-wide basis (i.e. for all user accounts), you can turn off the desktop user environment for every account on the system by logging in as root, and typing:

su

/etc/chkconfig desktop off

in a shell window. When you log out and log back in, your toolchest will not contain any items specific to the desktop user environment. Also, session management, desks, and icons on the background will be turned off.

To turn the user environment back on, log in as root and type:

su

/etc/chkconfig desktop on

in a shell window. Log out, then log back in. The user environment turns back on.