Update on July 24, 2010 I have install a small program for changing the background in MyWolfe-019, plan on using it from now on. scOtman gave me a small but useful little program which works quit well you can still edit it manually for added features but to change just the background image use the tool in the control panel jwm-background changer. Do keep in mind that because of the wbar it will restart the x server apron changing of back ground

Here we will discuss the background of JWM and how to customize it.

Introduction

The JWM or Joe's window manger has a lot of built in features that are at our disposal. One of those is to set the desktop to a image like it is now in MyWolfe-016. It can be changed to just a single color or even a gradient, you may even tile a pic you like.

In MyWolfe the background is in the .jwmrc file found at /root/.jwmrc. I will be moveing it to the /root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal file to make it easer to find and one day I hope to have a small program to help change it with a graphical interface. To change it you need to open /etc/xdg/templates/root.jwmrc with xfwrite which will allow you to edit the file and look for this line.

<!-- Virtual Desktops -->
<!-- Name tags can be contained within Desktops for desktop names. -->
<Desktops count="3">
<Background type="image">/usr/share/backgrounds/default.jpg</Background>
</Desktops>

By changing the /usr/share/backgrounds/default.jpg to the background picture of your chose and restart jwm you will have your background. Let us say you want it to have just a solid color then change type to solid and in between the > < put it the color you want.

Colors for various parts of JWM are specified within specific tags. Colors may either be hex triplets in RGB format (for example, #FF0000 is red) or by a name recognized by the X server. For components that support gradients, two colors may be specified separated by a colon.

As explained here you can have a gradient of color on your back ground.

<Background type="gradient">red:blue</Background>

Or let us say you just want one solid color then:

<Background type="solid">blue</Background>

Or there is the tile affect.

<Background type="tile">/opt/google/chrome/product_logo_32.png</Background>

Now the last step is if you want your changes to take affect immediately then you will need to open a term window and issue the command fixmenus then in the menu restart jwm and your background will be set.