Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I was looking for options to use a gif animation as background. Although it can be done it will need some stuff to be installed and could be cpu intensive if it's a large image. So the easier option is just running a video in loop mode either as fullscreen or in window mode whatever the size you require. There are lots of these videos that can be downloaded at a site like https://pixabay.com/videos/search/ Nice and small of about 30 seconds in duration.
I run a script for mpv in Xenial setting the loop, fullscreen and volume options. Additional option commands for mpv can be found here: https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options Note that the command for starting mpv may be different if you are running another Puppy. Example:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/mpv --profile=pseudo-gui --fullscreen=yes --loop=yes --volume=50 /initrd/mnt/dev_save/Downloads/Storm.mp4 "$@"

When you say "as background" do you mean that desktop icons overlay the mpv image and can be clicked?

You gave me an idea (thanks!) - I browsed to one of those pixabay videos (waves at byron bay) using Palemoon on desktop 2 (leaving all my other windows and main browser on desktop 1)

Now I can switch to the fullscreen video using alt+2 to switch desktops.

Quite peaceful to display the fullscreen video when i am idling between other tasks. Would be nice to have the system drop into desktop 2 automatically when i have not touched the mouse or keyboard for 10 seconds or so... (possible modifcation of screensaver script??)

@amethyst :-

amethyst wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 8:57 am

I was looking for options to use a gif animation as background. Although it can be done it will need some stuff to be installed and could be cpu intensive if it's a large image.

Nic, I would imagine you're looking at items like gtk-desklet & gifondesktop, which @fredx181 packed as .debs for the Dogs a few years back. I use them myself, since almost every Pup has something similar to this in the bottom left of the desktop background:-

Most Pups also have a rotating globe set as the launcher for an YAD-based Internet "multi-selector" mini-GUI.....like this:-

[Click to enlarge:-]

(The contents of this change from time to time, and the current iteration has two columns rather than one, but you get the idea.)

From what Fred says, there's no limit to the size of GIF you can use, so full-screen is a possibility, I would think. I'm not certain, however, if one could have it set such that the normal launcher icons would show above it....

Mike.

Mike might be referring to fred's post about gifondesktop, with attachment and advice, here: https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=74204. There are significant posts on the thread following the one cited.

akash_rawal published a version of gtk2desklet here, https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... f9#p588570. The link there to older versions seem to be broken.

Perhaps https://rockedge.org/psearch/ can find any still available.

Cheers guys but I reckon it's much cooler to run a nice video clip instead as sort of a screensaver. See the new nicOS-PowerTimeout pet I posted.

hmmm
i don't see this running as desktop background at all...
Desktop background in this case means what???

In my understanding, a Desktop Background will be what i see on my desktop, not in a (mpv - whatever) window.

BTW: mpv is not present on slacko64 7.0