Dr.Red XGL tweaks part 2

LINKS
Dr. red xgl tweak part 1
Dr. red xgl tweak part 2 - zooming, transparancy, top cube
Dr.red xgl tweak part 3 - SVG on top of cube

Moosy XGL page

Moosy is like Winston Wolve

I am Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.
Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction

about Zooming, Transparency and how to make a slideshow on top of your cube.

Note: Changes in the gconf-editor are effective imediatly, you don't have to restart your X server as I mentioned earlyer.. Sorry.. my mistake.

Zooming
I found that the zoom function was a bit of a hassle.. and change that. Since most of the keys are in combination with crtl and/or alt I decided to alter this to controlkey -> up and down arrow. To change this:

Startup gconf-editor from a terminal window.

Go to the key: Apps -> Compiz -> plugins -> Zoom -> screen0 -> options

Change the zoom_in key to Up.
Change the zoom_out key to Down.
change the terminate key to Down.

After this you can play around with pressing your control key, and your up and down arrow.

Or just press your control key, and the up key once, and release your keys. After this you can "look" around with your mouse.

To "exit" the zoom-mode now you can press the down key (without control) once.






Transparent windows
Transparency is not implemented in compiz, so you'l need to download the transset utility. Look for something like: transset-20040120-3.i586.rpm (maybe you'l need some dependency's, find and install these too)

After installing this you can open a terminal window. Transparency is given from 0 to 1. So, if you want 50% transparency, you use 0.5

So in this terminal window type transset 0.5

Your cursor changes to a cross. Select the desired window to give this transparency, and whoila!.. transparency is there...



(you could play around with xbindkeys to bind the transset-df to some funtionkeys, but therefore you need to install xbindkeys, transset-df and I think wxGTK stuff, and create a .xbindkeysrc file), this was the easy way ;)


Slide show on top of your cube
I got some questions about the slideshow on top of your cube... here it is..

The top of your cube is using SVG files for displaying images. But, this is still a subset of the svg "standard". Like embedded images are not displaying, Radial and gradients are not displaying correctly.

But, there differnt ways to create a svg file. The first.. From OpenOffice, make a presentation, and export the slides in svg format.

Or, i found that a wmf2svg util was installed on my Suse box. (I'm not sure where it comes from, try typing wmf2svg --help from your commandline). So if you have a wmf file, you can convert this to an svg file.

(I used Macromedia's flash "trace bitmap" option to convert bitmaps, and save/export them into .wmf format. After this I converted these to svg's using the command wmf2svg --auto .). So if anybody knows a good bitmap tracer for linux, please drop it here!!.. ;)




So if you have three slides, slide1.svg, slide2.svg and slide4.svg put these into a directory, i.e. /opt/slideshow

Start gconf-editor

First of all, make sure the snap-top option is enabled.

go to the key apps -> compiz -> plugins -> rotate -> screen0 -> options

Enable the snap-top key..

Now go to the key apps -> compiz -> plugins -> cube -> screen0 -> options

edit the "svgs" keys, and add the slides seperate.. like the image below.




Close the windows.. Now rotate to the top of your cube, press space or backspace to cycle trough the slides... And whoila,... you're there...

nice xgl'ing... ;)

Regards,
Dr. Red.