Thomas, As this thread has made me curious about what this is all about I have configured XPlanet as Randall suggests and I am running it right now on my desktop.
$HOME/.xplanet-local-invocations File does not exist
I can't find it either, but XPlanet runs just fine.
i am at the end of my knowledge, I checked this in the first place and after you wrote, I checked again and --just a black screen!
When I set up my script, I ran it several times from the shell before installing it as a KDE background generator. I experienced just the same as you - a black image. I am really not sure what causes that behaviour, but I learned to delete the image file generated by a previous run before running the script again from a shell account. This apparently made it work and I got to see what I was expecting to see. This is my script: exec \ xplanet \ -radius 45 \ -label \ -labelpos -1050+10 \ -label_string "Colombia desde el espacio" \ -color 0xffffff \ -font FreeMonoBold.ttf \ -fontsize 11 \ -latitude 04 \ -longitude -75 \ -projection orthographic \ -starfreq 0.03 \ "$@" \ You see,very similar to what Randall has suggested. It is in an executable script file under /usr/local/bin, and from my user shell account I invoke it as 'xplanet-local -geometry 1280x1024 -num_times 1 -output earth.jpg'. It produces a visible image 1280x1024 pixels, with my city centered. The file '$HOME/.xplanet-local-invocations' is NOT created. If I don't delete earth.jpg before subsequent runs of the script from the shell, XPlanet outputs the following message: "Warning: Resizing night map. For better performance, all image maps should be the same size as the day map" The resulting image is all black. Regards, -- Andreas Philipp Noema Ltda. Bogotá, D.C. - Colombia http://www.noemasol.com