'xeyes' : how to start 'undecorated' : and at boot?

Question

It's fun to run 'xeyes' on Raspbian - because of the big Raspberry in the middle of the desktop.

But by default if you just type 'xeyes' in a terminal : the eyes come up with extra 'decorations' on them, like this:

You can switch off the decorations by clicking on the top-bar of the xeyes window, so they end up looking like this (and the it looks like the Raspberry is watching your every (mouse) move !)

So how can I :

a) Make them show up 'undecorated' by default and b) Have them launch when I start my desktop ?

BTW: you need to install 'xeyes' on Raspbian - they are not there by default. I used :

sudo apt-get install x11-apps

Answer 1

Wow, xeyes. Been a while since I've seen that. Have you checked out xsnow, lol? (Actually I think you have to compile that from source now, no one even distributes it).

This isn't really an answer to A or B but it is an answer to C) How to make sure it ends up in the right place when undecorated.

For an answer to B, have a look into lxde autostart, which there will be many examples of here and elsewhere online.

For an answer to A, I think LXDE uses openbox as the window manager and you might be able to configure that way, see e.g. here.

Being a traditional X app it (ostensibly) obeys the --geometry setting. That man page doesn't explain it but the setting is always of the form widthxheight+horizontal+vertical, e.g., 5x10+50+25 but you can leave the w x h out, e.g., just +50+25. It's in pixels, so will take a few minutes playing around.

I wrote "ostensibly" because the window manager could screw with it -- that's what's adding those decorations. But probably not. There may be a way to tell LXDE to not used them for xeyes in particular, I dunno. As mentioned, I'd check and see if openbox is in use (ls -A | grep openbox) and investigate that.

Once you get the geometry worked out you can actually include it in a config file called /etc/X11/Xresources (I think this still exists by default), add something like:

xeyes*geometry +100+50

If it doesn't work source it from your .xinit or similar. But it may be easier for you to just include the command line invocation in an LXDE start-up thing, or a short hand script / shell function.

Answer 2

Edit /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml or ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml

Set

<decor>no</decor>

for the xeyes app.

EDIT: That file didn't work so I just added some lines after the big application example comment in file that was there. ~/.config/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml

This puts the eyes in the center:

pi@raspberrypi2 ~ $ cd .config/openbox/
pi@raspberrypi2 ~/.config/openbox $ tail lxde-pi-rc.xml 
-->
  <application name="xeyes">
   <position force="yes">
      <x>center</x>
      <y>center</y>
    </position>
    <decor>no</decor>
  </application>
</applications>
</openbox_config>
pi@raspberrypi2 ~/.config/openbox $ 

Answer 3

In Raspbian, there is also tuxeyes if you just want to install one app and not all the X11 apps. Great for checking if X11 Forwarding is working :)

sudo apt install tuxeyes