Typically you would run such a thing at a low priority value (with nice), so it only uses cpu if the cpu would otherwise be idle. But I guess it still makes sense to make it easy to temporarily disable it.
[Application] Xplanet with custom Frontend/Launcher (released)
- Thread starter F_Slim
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ptitSeb
Serial Porter
Maybe just playing with priority will do the trick, assuming the soft is re-entrant safe?
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The frontend has a toggle-button and can be minimzed to tray. So you can easily stop Xplanet anytime you want.
Like I said already in the first post: the usual scenarios of using the Pandora and a typical environment where you would keep Xplanet running in the background indefinitely differ quite a lot in the first place. There's no way I can compensate this with a simple frontend.
I can try to set the nice value on start (but I can already think of a reason why this will not be as straightforward as you may think).
I'm confused a bit though, +20 is supposed to be the lowest priority, but when checking processes with top, almost all of them (including Xplanet) already run at priority +20 anyway(?)
I found that Xplanet's -hibernate option (to stop Xplanet from rendering after the screen was idle for xx seconds) also doesn't work on the Pandora ...
Looks like it's a good thing I did not enter this to win, but to have a deadline by which I have to deliver something
Like I said already in the first post: the usual scenarios of using the Pandora and a typical environment where you would keep Xplanet running in the background indefinitely differ quite a lot in the first place. There's no way I can compensate this with a simple frontend.
I can try to set the nice value on start (but I can already think of a reason why this will not be as straightforward as you may think).
I'm confused a bit though, +20 is supposed to be the lowest priority, but when checking processes with top, almost all of them (including Xplanet) already run at priority +20 anyway(?)
I found that Xplanet's -hibernate option (to stop Xplanet from rendering after the screen was idle for xx seconds) also doesn't work on the Pandora ...
Looks like it's a good thing I did not enter this to win, but to have a deadline by which I have to deliver something
I added a button to download the daily cloud map from the xplanet-server. If it can't get the file you will get an error-message (saying to check your connection), otherwise you'll see a nice progress-bar until the download it finished.
(Python is just unbelievably great ... although it took me the whole day to get this simple thing going, but that's probably just my lack of experience with all the small things that can go wrong)
Is it possible to catch the signal which send to the system when the lid is closed/opened within Python? (If so: how?)
It's the only way I can see to stop/start Xplanet when the lid is closed/opened. Otherwise the user has to remember to stop Xplanet ... or suspend to RAM (which is what I thought is the usual thing to do), this works perfectly fine without stopping Xplanet beforehand ...
(Python is just unbelievably great ... although it took me the whole day to get this simple thing going, but that's probably just my lack of experience with all the small things that can go wrong)
Is it possible to catch the signal which send to the system when the lid is closed/opened within Python? (If so: how?)
It's the only way I can see to stop/start Xplanet when the lid is closed/opened. Otherwise the user has to remember to stop Xplanet ... or suspend to RAM (which is what I thought is the usual thing to do), this works perfectly fine without stopping Xplanet beforehand ...
Tried this out. I can see the UK! (or, rather, I can see all the clouds above the UK!).
It's fairly CPU intensive when it refreshes (Conky reports it as 95%), so I increased the Redraw value (it turns out the Earth doesn't change that much, anyway )
It's fairly CPU intensive when it refreshes (Conky reports it as 95%), so I increased the Redraw value (it turns out the Earth doesn't change that much, anyway
)Thanks for testing. Since it seems to be running fine I decided to release it. (I hope ED's server could take the massive traffic created by the 2 downloads of the beta )
All config files and images that come with Xplanet are now copied to the appdata folder, so you can easily view and change them.
If you are one of the 2 beta-testers I recommend deleting your appdata-folder (or at least the "images" subfolder).
(I only test for existence for that one and then cp with noclobber the required folders ... didn't want to put 10 if sequences into the startup-script ...)
1st post updated.
Download in the repo:
http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=xplanet.fs.000
Please rate if you like it, for me it really was a lot of work to write this frontend and make xplanet function!
Also post any problems or suggestions here.
I will probably extend the frontend (features like automatic download of cloud files and selecting seasonal earth-textures), mainly for personal use on my desktop-PC. Not all features will be usefull on the Pandora. So if you have Xplanet running on your PC and are interested in the frontend drop a line here.
)All config files and images that come with Xplanet are now copied to the appdata folder, so you can easily view and change them.
If you are one of the 2 beta-testers I recommend deleting your appdata-folder (or at least the "images" subfolder).
(I only test for existence for that one and then cp with noclobber the required folders ... didn't want to put 10 if sequences into the startup-script ...)
1st post updated.
Download in the repo:
http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=xplanet.fs.000
Please rate if you like it, for me it really was a lot of work to write this frontend and make xplanet function!
Also post any problems or suggestions here.
I will probably extend the frontend (features like automatic download of cloud files and selecting seasonal earth-textures), mainly for personal use on my desktop-PC. Not all features will be usefull on the Pandora. So if you have Xplanet running on your PC and are interested in the frontend drop a line here.
Rendering time depends a lot on the scene you want to render (ie. how many bodies are visible, texture sizes etc.). An image like the earth-screenshot takes a few seconds on my 1GHz Pandora.
I did not try it with Slackware yet, in principle it should work though. Wallpaper-updates will only work with xfce.
I did not try it with Slackware yet, in principle it should work though. Wallpaper-updates will only work with xfce.
I would like to thank everyone who voted for Xplanet in the competition! I was expecting maybe 2 or 3 votes on rank 3 if I'm lucky. In the end I got 9 on rank 3 and even 5 on rank 2!! That really makes the time and work I put into this worthwhile. Thanks a lot!
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