Clickable background

[FrankVdb]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a way to make my background clickable.

In other words: I would like to start applications by clicking on words, pictures or entire areas of my desktop. I've been looking for existing stuff but basically can't find what I'm looking for.

I'd be happy with a kind of headless Firefox that would allow me to do the things described above.

Thanks for any advice.

[WatchingThePain]

I don't quite understand but maybe you can have the whole desktop as a folder view or have loads of transparent panels?.
Are you using KDE ? because 4.1 lets you do all that.

[lovinglinux]

I guess what you want is something like the old IE Active Desktop. You should take a look into xwinwrap. You can use it to put videos, screen savers and I guess web sites as background.

Another option is to install screenlets. It has a "widget" that is a mini browser. You can add multiple copies of the same screenlet, each one with a different web site.

[FrankVdb]

I had never heard about xwinwrap. It definately deserves a closer look. Thank you for that.

However, WatchingThePain's tip involving transparent panels is a pretty good idea.

Sorry if I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to do. Basically, I want to be able to gimp a nice background and make areas of the image clickable (e.g. nicely crafted text). In the end, it would make panels as we know them superfluous, freeing up space on the desktop as well. My desktop would become far more intuitive. I could be as simple as selecting part of the desktop and making that into a starter.

I'm quite sure my little 6 year-old daughter would just love it. I would just let her write down the names of her favourite stuff, scan it and make the images with her handwriting clickable. I know I can do that with panels, but panels are too rigid. To begin with, every item on them needs to have the same size. That's a major limitation.

Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer. Sometimes I wish I had programming skills. Linux is great and it deserves more. It has given me far more than I will ever be able to give back.

I could imagine a Linux desktop with four different backgrounds in each viewport, each boasting different clickable areas. That would be great.

Now, for the time being, I'll try to superimpose transparent panels. Thanks for your tips guys!