I am developing an application that will run on Linux to run fullscreen all the time (no menus or trays or anything will be visible).
The application is going to be developed in Python, not that that matters as far as the window manager, but what I am having a hard time with is choosing a window manager.
I need something with the smallest possible footprint, that will let me run a graphical Python app and have an mplayer window at the same time, at widescreen resolutions (widescreen, 16:10,16:9, etc). Other than that, it doesn't need a lot of features, but the end footprint size is the most important thing I'll be looking at.
What window manager would you recommend?
EDIT: There won't be any interaction with the application needed.
You don't actually need any window manager or display manager. All you need to do is open your initial window with the same geometry as the root window. I suppose you could even draw directly into the root window if you wanted.
If you are using some display library it probably has an easy way to open a full screen window. For example using a recent enough version of SDL through pygame you can do
pygame.display.init()
surface = pygame.display.set_mode((0,0),pygame.FULLSCREEN,0)
to get a window that fills the entire screen. This will work even if there is no window manager running.
As for mplayer, it accepts the -geometry flag, so you can use something like mplayer -geometry 640x480+20+20 to display the mplayer window 20 pixels from the top 20 pixels from the left and with a size of 640x480 pixels.
You probably meant window manager. Display manages are KDM, GDM and the like. Windoe managers, to name, GNOME, Xfce, KDE, ratpoison, fvwm, twm, blackbox are a few. ratpoison gives full screen to the application that is in the foreground but demands heavy keyboard interaction (hence the name ratpoison) and no mouse interaction at all.
I assume you'll be running both your python GUI and mplayer in some sort of geometries combination that shows both at the same time, filling the screen.
As commented, you should not need a window manager to achieve that. You could have your python GUI app get command-line parameters for setting its window geometry and also call fullscreen mplayer with the -geometry parameter. That should fill the screen as expected, without any window decorations.
Now you could have the startx script called for the user running it all and have a custom ~/.xinitrc script doing something like:
#!/bin/sh
exec python my_gui_app --whatever-sets-geom &
exec mplayer -fs video.avi
If yout pyhon app will instead be launching mplayer then just leave the first 'exex' call (remove the '&') and have it call mplayer as desired with the expected dimensions in '-fs' mode.
Please note you may need to use something like the 'xset' program to disable monitor blanking due to energy savings, hide the cursor (although IIRC that's something mplayer does for its own window), and things like that.
Also, somethimes running, for example, GTK apps on a bare X display may end up using an "ugly" theme, so you may need to have the toolkit style configuration taken care of someway.
I am doing something similar on my "set-top box" and I don't use any window manager.
It boots debian, and from inittab I auto-login the user that runs the display. That user's .profile starts X, which runs .xinitrc, which starts my python app that runs as a network server in front of mplayer (running mplayer in -slave mode).
My python app does not have a GUI element - only mplayer runs on the X display. But in your case, it should be no different. As I mentioned in a comment to another answer, you may want to look into how you can reparent mplayer's window to give you greater control over its placement and/or movement/size.
Doing it this way avoided a display manager and a window manager. This simplifies the solution, boots faster and uses a smaller footprint (it runs of an SD card, with heaps of room to spare).
I realize this is an old question, but I use openbox on my system, I have created a custom config file that disables all mouse keyboard shortcuts, and removes borders etc on the applications.
In the openbox config i even created some secret shortcuts that can run fx. an xterm for debugging live on the box.
The openbox documentation was very helpful in figuring everything out, I did the config in about 30 minutes.
Related
My goal is to take screenshots off an application while the laptop screen is off, but instead the screenshot will always be the same as just before turning off the screen. It does not redraw itself once the screen is off, and remains frozen.
I'm obtaining a screenshot using printwindow from Python (using method described here: Python Screenshot of inactive window PrintWindow + win32gui
This method works nicely as long as I have my laptop screen on, but if I turn it off, it simply returns the last image before the screen turned off. I've tried using win32gui.RedrawWindow, hoping that this would force a redraw, but I haven't gotten it to work, even trying all the different flags. I've also tried getting screenshots via pyautogui, but this also has the same problem. Is there any way to redraw the application while the laptop screen is off?
It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to do what you want to do, but unfortunately it's just not possible without some convoluted low-level work.
In the underlying WinAPI, native windows redraw themselves only when they receive WM_PAINT messages, and they only receive WM_PAINT messages if they are visible. They don't get the messages if they're behind another window, or if they're dragged off screen, or minimized, or their visibility is set to False. They also aren't visible when the screen is off. Since they aren't visible, they simply never get told to redraw themselves. That's why the screen capture image doesn't change after the screen is turned off.
There is no command you can issue that will override this -- it is implemented as a fundamental part of the windowing paradigm.
One solution is to have the application paint itself in something that's not a window (e.g., a dialog box) and capture that rather than capturing the screen. You could also modify the application by overriding OnPaint and using a timer to invalidate and call your OnPaint function periodically (since WM_PAINT messages won't be received).
If it were me I'd override OnPaint, make my application draw itself to a background context bitmap rather than the normal window, then use a timer to invalidate and redraw periodically and just take the bitmap of the background context whenever I wanted to capture the output.
If you don't own the code for the applications that are running, you may still be able to get applications to redraw themselves by running everything in a virtual machine. I've done that successfully for headless computing in the past, but it was many OS versions ago and things may be different now, so YMMV...
Information on manual screenshots under VMWare is here.
Information on programmatic screenshots under Hyper-V is here.
Is there a way to bring the Linux terminal to the front of your screen from a python script? Possibly using some kind of os. command
I.e - Your python script opens up a GUI that fills the screen, but if a certain event happens that you want to see printed in the terminal to be viewed, but don't want to / can't show this information on the GUI (so please don't suggest that)
And if possible, hide it back behind your other windows again, if needed.
(Python 2, by the way)
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Not in any generally supported way.
Some terminal applications may support the following control sequences. However, these sequences are not standardized, and most terminals do not implement them.
\e[5t - move window to front
\e[6t - move window to back
\e[2t - minimize ("iconify") window
\e[1t - un-minimize window
— from http://rtfm.etla.org/xterm/ctlseq.html
That "bring the Linux terminal to the front of your screen" is likely talking about terminal emulators running in an X Window environment. Ultimately this is accomplished by making a request to the window manager. There is more than one way to do this.
xterm (and some other terminal emulators) implement the Sun control sequences for window manipulation (from the 1980s) which were reimplemented in dtterm during the early 1990s. xterm has done this since 1996 (patch #18).
Python: Xlib — How can I raise(bring to top) windows? mentions wmctl, a command-line tool which allows you to make various requests to the window manager.
xdotool is another command-line tool which performs similar requests.
finally, Can a WM raise or lower windows? points out that you can write your own application (and because python can use shared libraries written in C, you could write a script using the X library).
I made a program in python which allows you to type commands (e.g: if you type clock, it shows you the date and time). But, I want it to be fullscreen. The problem is that my software doesnt have gui and I dont want it to so that probably means that I wont be using tkinter or pygame. Can some of you write a whole 'hello world' program in fullscreen for me? What I am aiming for is for my program to look a bit like ms-dos. Any help??? By the way, im very new to python (approximately 4 weeks).
NOTE: I have python 3.4.1
Since Vista, cmd.exe can no longer go to full-screen mode. You'll need to implement a full-screen console emulator yourself or look for another existing solution. E.g. ConEmu appears to be able to do it.
Solution
Use your Operating System services to configure parameters.
<_aMouseRightClick_>->[Properties]->[Layout]
Kindly notice, that some of the python interpreter process window parameters are given in [char]-s, while some other in [px]:
size.Width [char]-s
size.Height[char]-s
loc.X [px]
loc.Y [px]
So adjust these values so as to please your intentions.
You may set negative values for [loc.X, loc.Y] to move/hide window edges "outside" the screen left/top edges
The goal is to have an application that runs on top of all other applications and windows in the desktop, and display a clickable control (say, an image button) that moves around the screen.
The application must run as a service in the background and show thebutton (let's say) each hour, once clicked it disappears until the next hour.
This application has to be written in Python.
It looks like PyQt is one of the better options, but I'm not sure if it does support this sort of functionality and if it is a good alternative for modern Windows applications.
What packages or frameworks are appropriate for this scenario? I have seen Pygl and PyGame but they seem to be limited to a window, is this correct?
You actually don't need to create the program as a service. You can just start the application and not show the window immediately. You can use PyQt or wxPython. I'm more familiar with wxPython, so if you went that route, you could use a wx.Frame style flag such as wx.STAY_ON_TOP to get the functionality you want.
I have created applications that load up in the system tray with just an icon. When you click the icon, it shows the frame. The rest of the time, the frame is hidden. I would try that route before looking at doing a service.
Hi I am new to this whole coding thing I was suggested to use Python. The version I have now is 2.7. I need help with making a transparent window to the copacity of 100 so that you can actually see through it and I also want to know how to make a fairy thick, out line of a rectangle in the colour red.
Help me please :S Thanks!
Unfortunatelly, there is not such an easy thing as sa "trasnparent window" - althougmodern widnow managaers do have various opacity controls for the windows, those just affect the windows as a whole - and do not integrate at all with the program running "inside" the windows. There may even be, for some of them, a way to call functions to explicitly set up the opacity level of a given window, but I don't think it willbe possible for all of them.
That said, it is possible to get grab of the "root" window and draw directly on the screen - -bypassing the window manager. There are APIs for that at least on Windows and Linux (you have to mention in what operating system you need that working) - but it will amount to not a trivial research work, since this is not what is expected of a "well behaved app" - for which the GUI toolkits are written and documented. You will need to write xlib code in Linux, and directly call win32 api's on windows - both are possible from Python - as possible as under-documented.
And once you get to draw the rectangle, since you are bypassing the window manager, you willhave to care about every low-level detail of your app: mouse event handling, screen-redrawing (and notifying the system of drawing taking effect over other windows), and so on.