2011-04-06 Once upon a time people used to worked on Unix systems without root access. Today, as Unix is common on personal computers, you often are root on the systems you work on. Hence you can set everything up like you want, without limitations. At the systems at university, however, I am just one of hundreds of unprivileged users. Therefore I used to take the systems as they were, like one does it on Windows systems. This was in contrast to how I used my own systems at home. Finally it needed only the question ``Why I didn't change it''. Unix and most of it's software is perfectly suited to be config- ured to one's needs by non-root users. In the current case it mainly meant the window manager. Instead of the default Gnome or Kde desktops I now have my modified dwm version ``aewl'' here too. It needed few more than a costumized ~/.xinitrc (or ~/.xses- sion). I copied a few files from other machines, adjusted config.h and compiled aewl. Fifteen minutes, not more, for a so much better user interface. :-) The largest problem was setting the wallpaper. (Yes, I do have a wallpaper.) Usually I use qiv(1) for that job, or feh(1) which is more common (and provides better scaling quality). qiv -z ~/wallpaper.jpg feh --bg-scale ~/wallpaper.jpg Unfortunately, these machines had neither of them. On one machine I found xloadimage(1) which provides: xsetbg ~/wallpaper.jpg It seems as if the best way is using the popular imagemagick package: display -window root ~/wallpaper.jpg This should be available on many systems. X11 itself offers AFAIK only xsetroot(1) which allows to set basic backgrounds but not a streched JPG file. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke