Macopix: How to have a virtual girl on your desktop (ArchLinux)

Linux has many useful applications, brilliant in networks and services, but on the desktop it also has its applications that make it attractive, fun. I had already told you before oneko, an application thanks to which we can have a pet walking on the desktop, now I come to talk about another more static, but prettier: Macopix

It is not a new application at all, far from it, but since we have never talked about it in DesdeLinux, and today applications like the old Tamagotchis are still popular, yes... those pets that asked us for food and etc., today we have an Android application called Pou, we can download Pou from PlayGoogle or download Pou free the same as any other site for our Android, and although Macopix is ​​not something so sophisticated, it makes our desktop a little more attractive, catches the eye of the curious 🙂

But let's get down to business ...

To install it in ArchLinux we must use the AUR repos, installing it with Yaourt:

yaourt -S macopix

When he asks us if we want to edit the macopix PKBUILD we must say YES, then, as indicated in the ArchLinux forum, we must replace the line that says:

LDFLAGS+=' -lX11' ./autogen.sh \

Change it for:

LDFLAGS+=' -lX11' ./configure --with-gtk2 \

And voila, we continue with the installation that thanks to Yaourt we will install all the dependencies and everything. By the way, I don't know if this application is in Ubuntu, Debian or similar repos ...

Once installed, we now go on to download the characters.

We must download a 4.1MB tablet, unzip it and set the unzipped folder as ours in macopix, run the following commands:

mv ~/.macopix ~/.macopix_DEF wget http://ftp.desdelinux.net/macopix-characters.tar.gz tar xf macopix-characters.tar.gz mv macopix-characters ~/.macopix

Ready, now we start running macopix (from Alt + F2 or from a terminal), the following will appear:

Here we choose which pack of characters we want to use, each pack in turn has several characters from which we can choose later, mark one (kanon.menu for example) and press Ok.

Once this is done, we will have one of these unique characters visible above the active application window, as we also see an icon in the SysTray (system tray, over there by the clock and notifications). If we click on the systray icon we have several options:

• Mascot Random Change (Change the character for another random one)
• Config (Go to Mascopix preferences)
• Save all
• Exit

In the preferences we have a lot of options, such as the position of the character (to change that it is always in the upper right corner), opacity (transparency), put a clock on the head of the character, well ... lots of options:

Oh by the way, you can run Mascopix more than once and have more than one character 😉

If you want that when executing it, the pack selection menu does NOT appear, but a character appears directly, you can execute macopix and pass the path to the desired character as the first parameter, for example:

macopix ~/.macopix/tsuki_arcueid.mcpx

They have a lot, many options to set directly from the terminal, you can read them by running:

man macopix

Anyway, here we have another application to make our desktop more attractive and fun, Macopix together with Oneko will make a stir on the desktop 😀

I hope you have found it interesting.

regards