Rotating desktop background

[lsaplai]

Hello all,

I'm currently using Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome desktop.

I'm using to the KDE desktop where I can set a "rotating" desktop background so that every so often (interval that I decide), the background changes. This way I can use several background images that I like and they keep changing automatically.

How can I do this in Ubuntu? The Desktop Background setup only allowa to choose 1 picture.

Thanks in advance!

[chinchilla2392]

thats a KDE only feature.. not gnome

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
if you want KDE
then click on session and select KDE at the login screen

[jordanmthomas]

You can change the wallpaper with gconftool-2

It would be fairly trivial to write a bash script that reads a file of approved wallpapers and sets the wallpaper to a random one. This script could be run by cron and voila!

Here's how I would do it:
1. Store all my wallpapers in a single folder.
2. make a file in my home directory called randomwalls
3. In this file, put the names of the wallpapers you want to randomly add:


a.jpg
b.jpg
c.png
...

4. Write a bash script that works something like this:


#!/bin/bash

#number of wallpapers you have available
NUM=$(wc -l ~/randomwalls | awk '{print $1}')

#get a random number between zero and the end of your file
CHOOSE=`echo "($RANDOM % $NUM) + 1" | bc`

#pick the line out of the list of wallpapers with the name of the file
WALLPAPER=$(head -n $CHOOSE randomwalls | tail -n 1)

#actually set the wallpaper using gconf
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename --type string $HOME/wallpaper/$WALLPAPER


5. chmod +x your script and add it to cron to be run however-so-often you want.

[chinchilla2392]

i was giving an easier option ;)
also assuming he is a KDE fan.
your solution is better though..

[asrai]

An even easier option is to install a little app called drapes. It is in the repos and will do just what you're after. Hope that helps.

[lsaplai]

Thanks everyone for the replies. For the time beimg I'm going to go for the easy, lazy solution and try Drapes, unless something better is suggested.

I use KDE on my laptop but I like the simplicity of Gnome on my desktop so I'm staying with it. Installing KDE edsktop would therefore not be the solution.

And writing a script, even with such good example, I'm not sure I'd do that at the moment. But I should keep it and study it for the future!

Cheers!