Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[mikeslr]

Recently there as been a renewed interest in xonclock, an analog clock for your desktop. One of the nice things about it is that you can customize the clock-face to match your color scheme and your wallpaper’s aesthetic. While customization isn’t difficult, it is not obvious, nor currently does there appear to be a guide. So, in addition to including two clock-faces you can use, I hope the following may help.
In both pemasu’s Exprimo, or by installing the currently available pet, xonclock’s clock-faces can be found in /usr/share/xonclock/skins. My systems use rox as their file manager. So if yours doesn’t, you’ll have to translate the following to instructions used by yours. I also used GIMP, so if you’re using a different graphics editor, you’ll have to find comparable steps.
If you open your filemanager to /usr/share/xonclock/skins, you’ll find that folder contains several skins and one symlink. The later is named “xonclock.png”. It is easiest if you place any new skins in that folder. [I frequently explore different Puplets. So what I actually do is save skins --in fact, all graphics files-- to a folder on mnt/home which will be accessible to any Puplet, and then copy as needed to whatever Puplet I’m working on: i.e., using rox open one window to /mnt/home/graphics/xonclock and another to /usr/share/xonclock/skins. Then drag, drop & select ”copy”].
Of course, you can design your own. But typing “analog clock” into the search box of your favorite web browser, then selecting “images” will generate a plethora of clock faces, some of which are free of copyright restrictions. You may have to use your favorite graphics application to “white-out” hour, minute and second hands, and otherwise touch-up the image. I found that sometimes an image simply downloaded crashed both GIMP and mtPaint. If that happens, you can use either Pupsnap or mtpaintsnapshot.sh to capture the image. Pupsnap has the advantage in that you can save it as a png file.
One thing I discovered I couldn’t do: Use a transparent background in the center of a clock face. Xonclock’s hour, minute and second hands apparently need some color to work against. I also do not know have to change those hands from their default “red.”
A Xonclock’s “stock” clock-face is. I think, 140 x 140 pixels. To change its size, open GIMP; then drag & drop your clock-face to its main panel. Then click Menu>Image>Scale Image and experiment. If the clock-face you downloaded was surrounded by a colored background, I found the easiest way to get rid of it was, after opening it in GIMP, click File>New and select Advanced Options>Fill with:>Transparency. Then using the Rectangular Select from the Toolbox panel, cut and paste the entire original file into the new file; and then use the Select tools repeatedly to delete unwanted colored areas. Save the finished image. Use View>Zoom>16:1 (suggested) for accuracy in deleting.
While playing with Zoom, you might want to decide what details should be deleted (e.g., blemishes) or colored over (e.g., blurred numbers). Switching occasionally to View>Zoom>2:1 will give you a good idea of what the clock-face will actually look like.
The last thing I do is adjust/change the color of the clock-face. The sliders in GIMP>Colors>Color Balance and Hua-Saturation make this so easy, that once you have a usable clock-face you can modify it for a different color scheme. Don’t forget to save the modification under a new name.
There are two ways to get xonclock to use your new clock-face: the easy and the safe. Xonclock will use whatever file is named “xonclock.png” --without the quotes. So the easy way is to simply delete or rename the present xonclock.png and give that name to the clock-face you want. Then restart X. The downside of this is that if you’ve deleted the old xonclock.png, its gone. The safe way is to create a symlink. As I am a klutz, I take the precaution of first renaming the current xonclock.png to xxonclock.png --note the 2nd x. If something goes wrong, I can easily reopen /usr/share/xonclock/skins and rename it “xonclock.png” recovering the condition prior to my screw-up. To create a symlink named xonclock.png. I do the following. Remember, I’m using rox.

1. Right-click an empty space in /usr/share/xonclock/skins and select:
Window>Terminal Here
2. In the terminal type:
ln -s XXX.png xonclock.png

Note: the l in “ln” is the letter l. “XXX.png” is the name of the skin you want to use. Example, if you wanted to use a skin named “Gold1.png” you would type:

ln -s Gold1.png xonclock.png

To view your new clock-face on your desktop, you’ll have to restart X. It will appear on the top-right corner of your screen, but can be dragged to wherever you want it.

mikesLr

[wjaguar]

[mikeslr]

wjaguar questioned my above assertion that images I downloaded "crashed" mtpaint rather than "failed to load."
My recollection was that I had opened the directory into which I had downloaded the image, right-clicked it and selected open in mtPaint. mtPaint did not open. I then opened mtPaint and browsed to the image and tried to open it which "closed" mtPaint. Dragging and dropping the image into GIMP, I think, produced the same result. My suspicion was not that there was anything wrong with either application but rather that somehow the images contained something which prevented them from being successfully copied, although I could find nothing which indicated that they had by copyrighted.
Following wjaguar's post, I attempted to duplicated the problem I encountered. Having deleted the images I had difficulty with I searched the web for them again and downloaded those I thought might be the ones. All could be opened in mtPaint. But I was running Three-Headed Dog and it occurred to me that I might have been running the Slacko which used the 3.1.10 Kernel. So I booted into Slacko and searched again. In Slacko, I was able to duplicate the problem with some, but not all, images in jpg format. I have emailed wjaguar attaching copies of the problem images for his analysis.

Last correction: Both mtPaintsnapshot.sh and PupSnap can save snapshots in png format. I don't know what I was thinking. I actually use mtPaint more often as it's easier.

mikesLr

[CatDude]

Hello mikeslr

Here are a few more clock-faces for you: 231-clock-skins.tar.gz (8.3 MB )
they were half inched out of MU's package: gdesklets-0.36-i586-2gsb-MU-200clocks.tgz

CatDude
.

[Flash]

[aragon]

[Flash]

Thank you.

[recobayu]