Re: Desktop background

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2000 at 05:35:30PM -0500 or thereabouts, Mike Bond wrote:
> 
> As I recall, the heart of the question was whether or not the GNOME
> background capplet had a way of controlling per workspace background
> images. The problem with GNOME controlling this as I understand it is
> that it is the wm that does the background switching as the workspaces

Ahh. Currently, like many people, I use a combination of Gnome for
setting some things and my window manager (windowmaker) for setting
others. And I have wondered how to get different backgrounds for
different workspaces. As I (don't?) understand it, Gnome and
windowmaker have slightly different ideas about workspaces, or 
something? (I remember that one of the pagers for Gnome did really
strange things with windowmaker.) 

Like someone who posted, when I had the windowmanager controlling
the backgrounds, Gnome would start up, draw its background, and then
windowmaker would superimpose its background on that. I tried disabling
the Gnome backgrounds out of curiosity, and then found that something
-- transparent gnome-terminals, I think -- wouldn't work. It was odd.
gnome-terminals would be transparent with reference to the windowmaker-
provided background (which I wanted) but switching the Gnome backgrounds
off stopped this. I got confused then.

When I got a decent monitor, I discovered that my windowmaker
themes looked _vile_ (they were pretty on the crap monitor!) and
switched to Gnome backgrounds anyway.

> I had actually asked about enhancing the background capplet to support
> multiple workspace background selections some time ago, don't remember
> any responses. I agree that it would be a great idea in the interests of
> simplifying usability if it could do this.

I would love this. I try to make my different workspaces different
in some ways, so I can tell which one is the one with all the 
connections to another machine, and which one is the one I keep
all the terminals where I'm su'd to root, and which one is the sillies
one and so on. Mostly, I use the tclass option of gnome-terminal for
that and have different appearances for windows on different workspaces. 
I saw a demo of Corel's Linux version running a while ago. It uses KDE, 
which I don't know a lot about. But either KDE, or KDE+Corel bits, was 
providing different backgrounds for different workspaces, and I 
was jealous :)

Telsa