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AMOR: a desktop companion

November 18th, 2007 edited by Wolfger

Article submitted by Christian Haase. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!

AMOR is a nice toy which is absolutely senseless. It displays a tiny figure on your desktop, running on top of your windows or falling down to the bottom. It is a KDE application, but it should be no problem to use it in Gnome (as I do).

worm on the move

In the package are several figures such as the FreeBSD-Daemon, and Tux (in 2 variations). There are also things like a ghost flown from a castle and some more. Some creatures are only static (the FreeBSD-Daemon, Little Billy, and the classic Tux), but the rest are animated. An list of the available themes is provided here.

ghostcat

If you like to see some tips, AMOR also supplies 2 kinds of speech bubbles for them. The first kind are the KDE-Tips and the second kind are for application related hints. Unfortunately there appear to be no applications making use of this second functionality.

The configuration is very simple. Just catch the creature to open the context-menu and choose to open the configuration-dialog.

Overall, as said by the name too, it is an “Amusing Misuse Of Resources”, but I do like the jumping glyphs while working.

AMOR was written by Martin R. Jones and Gerardo Puga. AMOR is in Debian from oldstable to unstable for the common architectures and in Ubuntu from dapper to hardy for amd64, i386 and powerpc. It depends only on some basic kde-libs (kdelibs4c2a, kdelibs-data, libqt3-mt) which are already installed on many systems. If you want to keep your non-KDE system clean try the “-s”-option of aptitude first and decide for yourself.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu |

12 Responses

  1. arno. Says:

    I’ve tried it, and it works fine on icewm. My favourite is the ghost one :) Thanks for the article

  2. Benjamin Eckenfels Says:

    Armor is always the first application my girlfriend forces me to install when i have to set up a new linux-box for her ;-)

  3. Claws Says:

    Can I get a Clippy one? ^_^

  4. Ingo Wagener Says:

    oh dear, how did I manage to live without it ;)

  5. Nikko Says:

    if you like amor, you might also like xpenguins

  6. mike Says:

    I haz a cat running on my windows :)

    Do you know any GTK+ variant?

  7. scorpfromhell Says:

    I guess this is something like Microsoft Agent … or is it the other way round?

    Any which way … is there anything like AMOR but that does not misuse resources?

  8. Wolfger Says:

    scorpfromhell: I think the point of the name is that anything that is like this is a misuse of resources.

  9. Jimmy Says:

    Does anyone know how to make new themes for it?

  10. itsjustarumour Says:

    Love it, evenings in on my own just aren’t the same without my cat! :-D

  11. Charliebrownau Says:

    Looks cool
    I am a new Linux user , currently using Debian v4 (3 dvd set) on my desktop gaming PC and Ubuntu EEE v8.04 on my EEE

    Is there any steps getting this working with Gnome with Debian ?
    Ive ‘installed’ it using apt-get install amor , but like so many linux ‘install’ commands it doesnt launch a setup program .

    I tired running it at the command line without luck it just brings up a huge amount of error messages
    Session management error: Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authenti cation protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed
    at the end

    Tired googling , most just mention it ads it to KDE in Debian/Ubuntu

  12. Charliebrownau Says:

    Never mind bringing up a wad of errors means its working .

    Got the kitty cat bouncing around the screen . Great tip !