[kde-linux] Very ugly image in X root window.

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Friday 11 November 2011, James Tyrer wrote:
> On 11/10/2011 12:19 AM, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> > On Thursday 10 November 2011, James Tyrer wrote:
> >> On 11/03/2011 10:54 AM, James Tyrer wrote:
> >>> Well, I have again wasted most of an hour trying to make a simple
> >>> change to KDE and have not succeeded.  Did someone miss the point that
> >>> hiding things does not make KDE easier to use?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Does anyone know how to change the X root window image (it is behind
> >>> the desktop but sometimes is viable) for KDE?  Or, if it is hard
> >>> coded, what is its name and location?
> >>>
> >> This is the image:
> >>
> >>       http://home.earthlink.net/~tyrerj/files/ugly.pn
> > "ugly" is a matter of taste: http://bennip.de/?p=1631
> It certainly is ugly when you expect something else and it is totally 
> out of place with the rest of your desktop.  But the reason that I said 
> that it is ugly is that someone appears to have decided for me that it 
> will be part of my desktop and there is no way to configure it or change it.

I've set now that image as my current plasma wallpaper. It wasn't difficult to 
find the file, already installed on my system, once I've realized that it has 
nothing to do with KDE at all. After that, it was also easy to track the image 
on Google down to its roots: http://www.andreasn.se/blog/?p=58

> > Looks like it is a plasma wallpaper, then you may change it using plasma
> > activity settings.
> >
> It doesn't really make much difference what it lookes like it is.  What 
> matters most is the exact name of the file for the image.  I think that 
> in the past that it was a plasma wallpaper, but it doesn't appear to be 
> in the current release.
> 
> It has nothing to do with plasma activity settings.  The backgrounds are 
> set with "Desktop Settings".  However, if you had bothered to read the 
> other postings in this thread before making a presumptive reply, you 
> would know that this is NOT the background for the Plasma Desktop but 
> rather appears to be an image which is behind the Desktop.  It might be 
> the X root window (or like it) but X commands do not change it.

You are right: I've not read the whole thread before. And I wish that I had 
never do that, to save me reading this:

> This is a single image.  Probably a jpeg file.  It looks like some of 
> the stuff that the Plasma "artists" have the hubris to call art.  There 
> are a bunch of diagonal green lines that are bent in the lower right (my 
> right) quadrant of the screen.
> 
> Since my "startkde" script has the same: "xsetroot" to black 
> instruction, I presume that this is part of Plasma.

And you talk about a "presumptive reply". Well, you are very wrong: this file 
never was a component of any KDE package. And in another message you wrote:

> GNOME is not currently working on my system.  I currently only have 
> enough of it installed to run GIMP, Gnumeric InkScape, and the theme 
> manager (this allows using KDE icon themes in GTK based apps -- it works 
> now that they are supposed to have the same names).  But, I don't think 
> that that is a GNOME wallpaper -- they don't do that type of stuff.

LOL :-D

I'm going to risk another guess: you are running gdm or some other Gnome 
infrastructure. Try:

$ ps uxaw | grep gdm

Regards,
Pedro