[SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

mike4ca · 2012-01-28 20:23:35

With all of the good wallpapers out there it is a shame to be stuck with manually changing them. I have seen distros with a rotating wallpaper. I could not find anything I liked. In AUR, there are some GNOME and KDE based solutions, but I did not want to go there. DesktopNova (https://sites.google.com/site/haliner/desktopnova) says it only works with GNOME and XFCE based systems as well. Not sure if anyone tried to get it working on a *box system. In the Arch wiki I found some info on perl scripts and read to the point of it wanting me to install ImageMagicK. I did not want to install a new image program.

I would be ok with the wallpaper changing when I log in or better yet, when I wake from sleep. Nitrogen restores from ~/.config/bg-saved.cfg. I could see a script that would pick a wallpaper from /usr/share/wallpapers and cat it into the bg-saved.cfg. Then placing that script into the autostart for Openbox and/or having a cron task setup to run that and then restart nitrogen.

I am not very good with scripts yet, if someone can point me in the right direction or recommend a product that already works I would appreciate it.

P.S. I know this section is for showing your Artwork, I thought it would be a good place to list how to do this. If not, feel free to move it to a more appropriate section of the forum.

Last edited by mike4ca (2012-01-29 22:29:08)

Mr Green · 2012-01-29 05:05:12

I am sure there are plenty of rotation scripts out there. Would not be that difficult to write one, you need to know what you want to do first.

Some I have seen even work related to time of day [sunrise] [day] [evening] [night]

The sky is the limit..

Good excuse to learn some code

WASD · 2012-01-29 05:46:32

Feh can be used to change wallpaper. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fe … er_manager

pablokal · 2012-01-29 08:39:29

See his post and thread: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/19893/#p19893

Or the original: http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/235

Save as rotate-wallpaper.sh save in usr/bin and make executable.

Simple example of Tawan if you have nitrogen installed:

#! /bin/bash
WALLPAPERS="/your/path/to/backgrounds"
ALIST=( `ls -w1 $WALLPAPERS` )
RANGE=${#ALIST[@]}
let "number = $RANDOM"
let LASTNUM="`cat $WALLPAPERS/.last` + $number"
let "number = $LASTNUM % $RANGE"
echo $number > $WALLPAPERS/.last
nitrogen --set-scaled --save $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$number]}

source: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/37849/#p37849
Comment: This script just changes the wallpaper. You need to call it from conky or cron or something and set the frequency there.
example of a cronjob every 5 minutes

*/5 * * * * ~/.chgwall/rotate-wallpaper.sh.

in /home/user/.cron

With image changer desklet you can let rotate almost the entire desktop: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/55575/#p55575
if you edit the code for the image as to cover almost your screen entirely.

mike4ca · 2012-01-29 22:28:22

Thanks everyone. I modified the script from pablokal since it utilized the existing nitrogen. I don't need it change while I am working and put my computer to sleep nightly so I added the pm-suspend and saved as mfsuspend.sh in /usr/bin (and made executable). I have a keybinding for super-z that I set to execute my new script. So now when I go to suspend, the wallpaper changes just before it goes to sleep. Here is the modified script.

#! /bin/bash
WALLPAPERS="/usr/share/wallpapers"
ALIST=( `ls -w1 $WALLPAPERS` )
RANGE=${#ALIST[@]}
let "number = $RANDOM"
let LASTNUM="`cat $WALLPAPERS/.last` + $number"
let "number = $LASTNUM % $RANGE"
echo $number > $WALLPAPERS/.last
nitrogen --set-scaled --save $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$number]}
sudo pm-suspend

One thing I noticed was the script does not like files that have a space in the name. So the quick fix was to go and rename the files.

Last edited by mike4ca (2012-01-29 22:34:37)

oliver · 2012-01-30 08:31:30

mike4ca wrote:

One thing I noticed was the script does not like files that have a space in the name. So the quick fix was to go and rename the files.

Untested. but adding the following to the script should resolve that

export IFS="
"

WASD · 2012-01-30 17:44:30

Yeah, spaces in filenames just tend to cause troubles. I make sure to safe files i get without spaces and if I find one with spaces I may fix it.

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#1 2012-01-28 20:23:35

[SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#2 2012-01-29 05:05:12

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#3 2012-01-29 05:46:32

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#4 2012-01-29 08:39:29

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#5 2012-01-29 22:28:22

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#6 2012-01-30 08:31:30

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

#7 2012-01-30 17:44:30

Re: [SOLVED] Automatically Change Wallpaper

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