Question about a piece of software...

[djweber96]

Hello,
I have had this account for a while but have not really started using it until now, see I have a question about this program called XPenguins. This program I used to enjoy on Linux and was a nice addition to the desktop. Here is the Website: http://xpenguins.seul.org/ to see what I am talking about. Now back to the question...see since the Linux is based on unix and Mac OS X is based on Unix, is there a way to compile that program to work with the Mac desktop? Thanks in Advance!
-Dylan

 

[bmcgonag]

I want to say, and please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but people use a couple of methods for running programs from linux on OS X.

Fink and Darwin Ports are the methods ( or translators ) that I'm thinking of. I haven't really done much with them, but I believe that it may be the method for a lot of linux based apps to run on macs.

The method I'm sure will work, is to download VirtualBox, and use it to install a linux distro of your choice and run XPenguins on that.

Hope this helps at least a bit,

 

[Makosuke]

The short answer is "sort of".

XPenguins is X11 based, and OSX has a full X11 environment available as an optional install. If you compile a binary for OSX, it should run just fine in Apple's X11.

However, it needs a "root" window in which to run, which by default Apple's X11 implementation does not have. You can turn it on via the preferences, but then everything else will be covered up by this root window, so it's kind of useless unless you're only running X11 apps. It'll get you your penguins, but nothing else.

You can tell XPenguins to run in a specific X11 window via a command-line flag, in which case you'll have it running, essentially, on top of another X11 app.

If you do a Google search for Xpenguins Mac, the first couple of hints will point you in the right direction for doing both of the above.

There's also an XScreenSaver mod that will run it in XScreenSaver, which does have a Mac native version, but it's not clear to me from a glance how to apply the mod. If you got that working, you'd have XPenguins running as a .saver OSX screen saver module, at which point you could either let it do its thing as a screen saver, or display a screen saver on the desktop background and have it running there.