32. Backdrop¶
The backdrop is what you see behind the windows. Backdrop chooses a CDE pattern, a picture or just a colour, for one workspace or for all four.
For which workspace¶
Workspace at the top says whose backdrop you are changing. It opens on the workspace you are in, so Apply changes the backdrop you see, as in CDE. Choose another workspace to give it a backdrop of its own: the fields below show its backdrop, and Apply stores it without changing the screen. You see it the next time you switch to that workspace. The workspaces are listed under the names you gave them (chapter 24).
All workspaces gives all four the same backdrop and drops the ones they had of their own.
Choosing a backdrop¶
The list on the left offers, from top to bottom:
- No Backdrop (color only): a plain colour, the colour below.
- amadeOS Default: the amadeOS picture of a new account.
- The CDE backdrops: the 26 patterns of the original CDE, from Ankh, BrickWall and Corduroy to Pebbles, RicePaper, SkyDark, WaterDrops and Wooly.
- The amadeOS pictures: mountain-lake.png, a mountain lake, halloween.png, a graveyard under the full moon with witches, werewolves, skeletons and zombies, made for the Halloween palette, and two pictures for the Christmas palette (chapter 31): christmas.png, a snowy village with the nativity under the star, little angels, a Christmas tree, a snowman, gingerbread men and an elf, and christmas-santa.png, Santa's sleigh with Rudolph over houses trimmed with lights.
- Your pictures: the pictures in the folders below.
Click an entry and the Preview on the right shows the desktop with it. Apply puts it on the screen.
Your own pictures¶
Browse… next to the Image field picks any picture on the computer: PNG and JPEG photos, and the CDE pattern formats .pm and .bm.
Pictures in these folders appear in the list by themselves:
| Folder | For |
|---|---|
~/Pictures/Wallpapers and ~/Pictures |
Your own pictures |
~/.local/share/backgrounds |
Your own pictures |
~/.config/amadeos/wallpapers and ~/.config/amadeos/backdrops |
Your own pictures and patterns |
~/.dt/backdrops |
Patterns from an old CDE account |
/usr/share/backgrounds |
Pictures for all users of the computer |
/usr/share/amadeos/backdrops/cde |
The CDE patterns |
Scaling¶
A picture rarely has exactly the size of the screen. Scaling decides what happens:
| Scaling | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fill Screen (Crop) | Fills the whole screen; the edges of the picture that stick out are cut off. Usually the best for photos. |
| Fit to Screen (Letterbox) | Shows the whole picture; bars of the backdrop colour fill the rest. |
| Stretch to Screen | Fills the screen exactly, and distorts the picture if its shape is different. |
| Tile Pattern | Repeats the picture like tiles. The CDE patterns always tile. |
| Center (Original Size) | Puts the picture in the middle at its own size, on the backdrop colour. |
The colour¶
Color… chooses the backdrop colour: the colour of No Backdrop, and of the bars around a picture. The CDE patterns are drawn in shades of this colour, so the same pattern looks quite different in blue, sand or green, just as in CDE.
Halloween
For the full Halloween look, choose the palette Halloween under Color and then halloween.png here, with Fill Screen (Crop).
Christmas
The same works for Christmas: the palette Christmas, then christmas.png or christmas-santa.png. With one picture on some workspaces and the other on the rest, both are on the desktop.
A backdrop for each workspace
Different backdrops make it easy to see at a glance where you are, for example a calm colour for the workspace with your mail and a photo for the one with your games. The workspace buttons in the Front Panel keep their own colours (chapter 31).
Under the hood
The backdrops are stored in ~/.config/amadeos/wallpaper.conf: the picture, the scaling and the colour for all workspaces (wallpaper, mode, color), and for each workspace with a backdrop of its own the same three under workspace.2. and so on. Apply draws the backdrop on the X11 root window, the screen behind all windows, if it belongs to the workspace you are in. The window manager reads the file at every workspace switch, draws each backdrop once and then only swaps them, so switching stays quick.