What is it?
No operating system would be complete without a version of
Kirk Johnson's excellent
XEarth
program which makes an image of the Earth, correctly shaded for the current position of the sun.
Installing
The BeEarth package consists of these three programs:
beearth
This is the command line program that actually generates the image. You don't have to put it in the bin directory if you don't want to, but it doesn't hurt :). It outputs the image on standard output as in PPM format. Check out the man page for all the command line options.
DesktopEarth
This is a simple GUI wrapper around beearth that allows you to specify all the command line options graphically. Read the man page to see what all the options mean. It would be a good idea to make a link to this in your Preferences folder.
Once you specify all your settings, hit Set Background and then to the Backgrounds preference app to set up the new background however you want it (it will have been added to the menu of images). If you have the EarthDaemon running, this image will be updated periodically. NOTE: once you set up
the image as your background any changes you make with DesktopEarth will take effect immediately.
If you select Replicate, a rendered image of the Earth is displayed. This image is a replicant, so you can drag it to any replicant accepting view, like the Desktop, for instance. You can configure the replicant from the popup menu of its dragger.
EarthDaemon
If you have this background app running, your Desktop Earth background image will be updated periodically. It's a good idea to automatically run this from
UserBootscript.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The method used to set the desktop background is *undocumented* by Be at this time, so this is not guaranteed to work in future versions of the OS.
Removing Earth Background
If, heaven forbid, you get tired of having this as your background, just go to your
Backgrounds
pref app and change the image. You should also kill EarthDaemon and/or remove it from
UserBootscript.
Version history
1.5
Now takes advantage of R4's background desktop picture feature.
Now looks up beearth binary by its app signature, so it doesn't have to be installed
in the bin directory
BlanketEarth module taken out for now. May put back in with release of R4.1
1.0.2
Initial x86 version.
Moved dragger to top left so it won't ever disappear if you resize the image.
Fixed up thread code a bit.
1.0.1
Fixed problem with Replicant "blowing up" after restart if placed in the Desktop.
Intel version.
1.0
inital release
Things to Come
Addition of markers for cities.
Implement timewarp option.
Maybe some nifty options for the screen saver
If any spiffy new features are added to XEarth, I'll add 'em to BeEarth.
Etc.
Send comments, suggestions, hate mail etc, to rickb@spy.net. If you fell like blasting me out of the sky, head on over to ICI Games, my handles' beboy-. The lastest and greatest versions of all my software and other cool stuff can be found at rickb.com.
Source code is available on request.
BeEarth does not use LZW compression. All the gif related code was stripped out of the original XEarth source.
XEarth README
