XPENGUINS - cool little penguins walking along the tops of your windows
Copyright (C) 1999-2001  Robin Hogan
Latest version: 2.1 (20 May 2001)


INTRODUCTION

XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your
root window. By default it will be penguins - they fall from the top
of the screen, walk along the top of windows, up the side of windows
and do various other stuff. Other themes in the base package are
"Classic Penguins", reproducing XPenguins version 1.2, and "Turtles".
More themes can be downloaded from the XPenguins web site
(http://xpenguins.seul.org/). 

To run, type "xpenguins". Type "xpenguins --help" to see the available
options, or read the man page (type "man xpenguins"). If you want to
make your own theme, read the THEMES section of the man page and have
a look at the config file for the default theme (which is usually
installed in /usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config). You may
also find the gimp script "lay-out-frames.scm" useful - it lays out
the frames of an animated gif side by side in a way that can be used
by xpenguins.


INSTALLATION

Do the following:

	./configure
	make
	make install (as root)

By default everything will be installed in /usr/local. Use
"./configure --prefix=/usr" (or similar) to install it somewhere
else. For more information, read the INSTALL file, or type "./configre
--help". If you have problems with the make process then try using
"gmake" instead of "make".


LICENSE

This program is released under the GNU public license - see the
COPYING file. This license applies to everything in the base
distribution, including the themes "Penguins", "Classic Penguins" and
"Turtles".


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

"The program is running but I can't see any penguins. Why?"

"KDE 2, CDE, Enlightenment 0.16 (for desktops > 0), the Nautilus file
mangler, and possibly others, all put a big X window over the root
window. In the case of KDE 2.0 and 2.1, Enlightenment and Nautilus
1.0, XPenguins should be able to find this window and draw to it
instead of drawing to the root window. It then reports `Drawing to XXX
Desktop' when it runs. Unfortunately there is no standardised way to
find the correct window, so in later versions of any of these programs
it might fail. When this happens the program looks like it's running
but no toons are visible. Also, hybrid combinations such as KDE plus
enlightenment might fail. CDE will probably never work, although
XPenguins should definitely work with simpler window managers like
sawfish and blackbox."


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Inspiration was provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of
the classic "xsnow".

Many of the penguin images were taken from "Pingus", a free lemmings
clone for Linux (http://pingus.seul.org/), and were designed by Joel
Fauche <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and Craig Timpany
<timpany@es.co.nz>. Rob Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com> provided
some new penguin images now used in the default theme.


AUTHOR

Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk>

The xpenguins homepage is located at http://xpenguins.seul.org/


SEE ALSO

Michael Vines <isamu@neomueller.org> has rewritten the program (as of
version 1.1) for Microsoft Windows and called it "WinPenguins" -
visit http://neomueller.org/~isamu/winpenguins/ 

