Earth wallpapers for Ubuntu Linux - xplanetFX

xplanet (by Hari Nair) is a great piece of software capable of creating renderings inside our solar system. To raise the quality of it’s output adding some graphical effects, it was a great candidate to link with imagemagick.

The result is xplanetFX, a user-friendly piece of software to configure, run or daemonize xplanet with h/q capabilities to create wallpapers of mother earth on your desktop.

More realistic maps and backgrounds and a sophisticated graphics handling produce nearly photo realistic images of our mothership. It’s GTK GUI makes it really easy to use and provides a lot of settings and a user friendly access to xplanetFX. And even the templating capabilities give xplanetFX an individual and stylish touch.

The features of xplanetFX
 * Fluffy clouds with bumps and shadows floating above the earth
 * High quality earth map with bump, color corrections and subtle sea levels
 * Corona with realistic lighting
 * Atmospheric gleam towards the lit edge
 * Specular reflection of the sun on water, ice and clouds
 * Templates with online pool to download from
 * Post processing with contras and color correction and a subtle “washed out” effect
 * Seamless wallpaper change in GNOME, FLUXBOX, KDE < 4.3, XFCE and XFCE4, Fluxbox and feh wallpaper changer
 * Option to render to a specific file and invoke a command afterwards (change wallpaper of any other envrionment)
 * Startup delay to load desktop first
 * Creating single renderings for use in shell scripts
 * detailed logging
 * CLI Setup with customization depending on actual config (reconfigurable)
 * Small Toggle window for placing a starter in the panel
 * Daemon with nice value (less aggressive)
 * GTK user interface (english, russian, italian, french, spanish, japanese, dutch, czech, greek and german by now)
 * Different list views
 * Online theme pool
 * Extensive functionality in customization
 * Previews

XplanetFX Installation:
From Ubuntu Terminal screen (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type:

wget http://repository.mein-neues-blog.de:9000/PublicKey
sudo apt-key add PublicKey
rm PublicKey
echo "deb http://repository.mein-neues-blog.de:9000/ /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xplanetfx

Setup and configure xplanetFX :
From Ubuntu Terminal screen (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type:

xplanetFX --setup

in the terminal gives the option to place a starter in autostart for GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktops. If you want to do it manually use the following command for a delayed desktop start:

xplanetFX --autostart

The delay is used to let your desktop load completely before firing up xplanetFX the first time and can be configured by CLI and GUI.

or, you can configure xplanetFX using GUI application, type following command: xplanetFX --gui