Martin Henze

You always wanted to have a random Wallpaper for GNOME? Read ahead, I found a public domain script and modified it, so it works fine with Ubuntu and supports more image types.

You need a new directory to save only the wallpapers in (e.g. ~/.wallpapers). Your wallpapers should have the correct size for your resolution and can be .jpg, .png, .gif and .bmp.

Then copy this PERL script to a new file (e.g. named ~/random_background.pl), edit the path and make it executeable:
(Sorry for the messed up code, I’m not too firm with Wordpress)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $pic_path = "/home/martin/.wallpapers/";

sub get_selected_pic($)
{
my $sel_pic = $_[0];
my $fname;

if(opendir(DIRFH, $pic_path))
{

while(defined($fname = readdir(DIRFH)))
{
if($fname eq "." ||
$fname eq ".." ||
$fname !~ /.jpg|.png|.gif|.bmp/)
{
next;
}
if($sel_pic == 0)
{
# We select the file which appears
# at the sel_pic number
return $fname;
}
$sel_pic--;
}

closedir(DIRFH);
}
}

my $tot_pic = `ls $pic_path | wc -l`;
my $sel_pic = int(rand($tot_pic));
my $sel_pic_name = get_selected_pic($sel_pic);

if($sel_pic_name =~ /.jpg|.png|.gif|.bmp$/)
{
`gconftool -t str -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "$pic_path/$sel_pic_name"`;
}

Now you have basically two options:

1. Changing the wallpaper periodically, e.g. each x minutes. Type crontab -e on your bash, then insert line:
   x * * * * * /path/random_background.pl
   where x are the minutes (from 1 to 59).
2. Changing the wallpaper at each login. This is much easier then changing the wallpaper periodically. Just go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs and add your script.

Just put atleast one wallpaper in your wallpapers folder and enjoy the rotating wallpapers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 14:29 and is filed under Ubuntu Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.