BACKGROUND VIEW

Long gone, and rightfully so, are

the days when Windows experts

used to sell their users on wallpaper

stripping as a top secret tuning tip.

Modern computers have more than

enough memory for a desktop background.

And in contrast to Windows 95,

most window managers in the Linux

world can handle graphics in compressed

and thus smaller formats such

as PNG or JPG.

Desktop environments typically have a

preferences dialog where users can

select a wallpaper. More basic window

managers may expect you to store background

images in a specific directory, or

even to point to the image in a configuration

file. Command-line programs that

load a background image remove these

restrictions. In this month’s article, we

will be looking at two applications that

offer you more than just the ability to

paint a picture in the root window: Esetroot

[1] and hsetroot [2].