What is it?
No operating system would be complete without a version of
Kirk Johnson's excellent
XEarth
program which makes an image of the Earth, correctly shaded for the current position of the sun. BeEarth consists of three parts, the core command line program, a Replicant based view, and a Blanket screen saver module.
Installing
All the GUI programs are just wrappers for beearth, so beearth itself needs to be installed in a common bin directory. Also, the PPMTranslator needs to be installed in your Translator add-ons directory in order to read beearth's output. Additionally, the BlanketEarth module needs to be installed in the Screen Saver add-ons directory if you have the Blanket screen saver. You can run the install.sh script to do all this for you. If you install things manually, make sure to run mimeset on everything first or they will probably not work correctly.
beearth
Check out the man page for all the options.
ReplicantEarth
This is a simple GUI wrapper around beearth that allows you to specify all the command line options graphically. Read the man page to see what all the options mean. Once you specify all your settings, a window with the rendered image of the Earth is displayed. This image is a replicant, so you can drag it to any replicant accepting view, like the Desktop, for instance. You can configure the replicant from the popup menu of its dragger.
BlanketEarth
The configuration view for this module is similar to the Replicant's, just shrunk down with some of the options removed so it'll all fit.
Version history
1.0.1
Fixed problem with Replicant "blowing up" after restart if placed in the Desktop.
Intel version.
1.0
inital release
Things to Come
x86 version if anybody wants to build one for me.
Addition of markers for cities.
Implement timewarp option.
Maybe some nifty options for the screen saver
If any spiffy new features are added to XEarth, I'll add 'em to BeEarth.
Etc.
Send comments, suggestions, hate mail etc, to rickb@spy.net. If you fell like blasting me out of the sky, head on over to ICI Games, my handles' beboy-. The lastest and greatest versions of all my software and other cool stuff can be found at rickb.com.
Source code is available on request.
BeEarth does not use LZW compression. All the gif related code was stripped out of the original XEarth source.
XEarth README
