Xmartin 2.2 - grandson of xfroot - 24 July 1991 ----------------------------------------------- Ed Kubaitis (ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu) DISCLAIMER: This software is provided "as is" and with no warranties of any kind. Xmartin is an X11 root window decorator based on the Barry Martin hopalong algorithm (see A. K. Dewdney's column in the 9/86 Scientific American.) See the HISTORY file for changes since xmartin 2.1. Installation Instructions ------------------------- The materials include both an Imakefile and a simple makefile (xmartin.mk). Review the one you intend to use and make any changes needed for your environment. Xmartin is very floating-point intensive. Be sure to include in CFLAGS any options to improve floating-point performance (eg: -f68881 on Sun 3's.) If your system does not have perl(1) installed, you may want to comment out the lines having to do with "xmartin+". If you have perl but it is not in /usr/bin/perl, modify the first line of xmartin+.pl. If you find it necessary to modify the source code to get xmartin to compile or execute correctly, I'd appreciate hearing about the problem and what you did to get around it. I'd also appreciate hearing about success on platforms other than those below. Xmartin has been built & tested on the following client platforms: o IBM RS/6000 540 AIX 3.1.6 - (X11R4) Perl 4.010 o Convex 240 9.0 OS (X11R4) Perl 4.010 o Sequent Symmetry S81 Dynix 3.0.17.7 (X11R4) Perl 4.010 o Sun 3/50 SunOS 3.5 (X11R4) o Sun 3/60 SunOS 4.1 (X11R4) o VaxServer 3500 BSD 4.3/Reno gcc (X11R4) Perl 3.37 o Apollo 425t DomainOS 10.3.4 unoptimized cc (X11R3) o VaxServer 3500 Ultrix-32 V3.0(Rev 64) (X11R4) Perl 3.15 o Cray 2 Unicos scc (X11R3) And with the following servers: o NCD 19 monochrome - X11R3 o Sun 3/50 monochrome - X11R4 o Sun 3/60 color - X11R4 o Visual Turbo X-19 grayscale - X11R4 o IBM RS/6000 320 color - X11R3 o IBM Xstation 120 grayscale - X11R3 o IBM Xstation 120 color - X11R3 Using xmartin ------------- After installation, the unadorned command 'xmartin' should set your root window to one of the roughly 1e64 basic hopalong patterns. Review the man page for options you may want to try. 'xmartin help' or 'xmartin+ help' yield a concise synopsis of options. On clients without strong floating point performance, try '-tile' which reduces calculation time by a factor of 2 to 64, and produces some pleasing effects as well. Using xmartin+ -------------- On systems with perl, several additional features are available with the xmartin+ front end to xmartin. Executing xmartin+ will create a ~/.xmartin+ file with entries you can modify to tailor the random probabilities and parameter ranges hardwired into xmartin. The file has comments describing its format and several sets of xmartin parameters you can request by name by xmartin+ -n name 'xmartin+ -q' lists the names available. 'xmartin+ -demo' will invoke xmartin once for each name. (If you don't have perl, you can peek at these parameter sets in the xmartin+.pl source.) I'd appreciate hearing about any interesting parameter sets you discover. xmartin+ also has options to save an interesting pattern in ~/.xmartin+ and to generate patterns repeatedly. About perl: perl is a language devised by Larry Wall with most of the features of new awk, sed, tr, shell scripts, and C -- sort of one-stop shopping for things you don't want to do in C. It has it's own newsgroup (comp.lang.perl) and O&A Nutshell book: Programming Perl (info: 1-800-338-6887.) The source is freely available (jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov in pub/perl.4.0/kits@0). It builds easily on most un*x platforms and can usually be coaxed on the others. Acknowledgements ---------------- o Clifford Pickover (cp1 sine sculptures) o Renaldo Recuerdo (rr1 algorithm & other suggestions) o Kevin Meek & Ranjan Bagchi (tvtwm support) o Bob Bubon (DEC window manager support) o David Elliot (multiple screen support) o Robert Forsman (example code for reducing color intensity) o Thomas Breuel (background color suggestion) o Jon Stone (-p/-P %-of-pixels suggestion) o Michael Traub (X-Vision/Sequent testing, color parse fix) o Wayne Richardson (RT 4.3 compile fix) Quotes ------ Clearly these curious configurations show us that the rules responsible for the construction of elaborate living tissue structures could be absurdly simple. --Barry Martin ...delicately poised between random smoke and severe geometry. --Clifford Pickover ---------------------------------- Ed Kubaitis (ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu) Computing Services Office - University of Illinois, Urbana
