One fun change you can make is customizing your desktop in a pretty unique way – by changing the background image every so often automatically. While some programs exist to help you with this task, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot do it yourself with a few simple commands. Before long you can have your entire vacation album scrolling behind your open windows, changing photos every five, ten, or thirty minutes – it’s entirely up to you.

To begin, open a terminal window and open a new text file:

gksu gedit

You are going to insert a line of commands into this file, which you will later turn into a shell script. The function of each line is outlined below; you only need to copy and paste the big block of text further down. The individual explanations are so you can customize the code to fit your needs.

picsfolder=”/media/documents/photosfordesktop”

This line points to whatever folder holds the photos you want scrolling in the background. Be sure to change it to whatever folder holds yours.

cd $picsfolder

This changes the current directory to the new folder full of pictures.

files=(././.jpg)

This creates an array out of all your photos, allowing them to be mixed up for display later.

N=${#files[@]}

This simply identifies the number of pictures in the new array.

((N=RANDOM%N))

This chooses a random photo from those you made available.

randomfile=`echo ${files[$N]} | cut –characters=”1 2” –complement`

This identifies the name of the specific photo chosen.

Gconfigtool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “$picsfolder$randomfile”

This sets the desktop with your new (temporary) photo as the background.

Now, take all those commands, put together below, and copy and paste them into the text editor you opened earlier:

picsfolder=”/media/documents/photosfordesktop”
cd $picsfolder
files=(././.jpg)
N=${#files[@]}
((N=RANDOM%N))
randomfile=`echo ${files[$N]} | cut –characters=”1 2” –compliment`
Gconfigtool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “$picsfolder$randomfile”

Save your text document as /bin/timedwallpaper.sh and exit the text editor. Everything is ready – now you just need to tell your computer to do it. For this next part your distribution needs to have “cron” installed, a program which typically comes pre-packaged. To make sure you have it, type

sudo apt-get install cron

Once you have ensured it is installed, type

crontab -e

At the bottom start a new line and type

*/5 * * * * timedwallpaper.sh

This sets the time between pictures at five minutes. Change the number to whatever you see fit. Arrow down to the next blank line, and then type

@reboot timedwallpaper.sh

After that, press Control+x, then y, and finally enter. Exit the terminal and you are good to go. Not only will your script run however often you program it to, it will now reset each time you start your computer as well. Enjoy the scenery!

anyPaper is a front end for the wallpapersetter command. And in this article I will show you how to install and use the handy desktop wallpaper tool anyPaper.

Features

anyPaper doesn’t boast a huge set of features. But what it does do is handy. Here is the feature set:

• Preview of selected image
• Six wallpaper modes (fullscreen, normal, tiled, adjusted, scaled and custom scale)
• Customize background color, image position, wallpapersetter and screen size
• Preview of background before setting
• no-set option for only handling images (command line)

Installation

Installation of anyPaper is quite simple. You will find this application in your distribution’s standard repositories. Because of that, all you need to do for installation is follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software utility.
2. Search for “anypaper” (no quotes).
3. Select anypaper for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. If you do not already have the wallpapersetter command installed, anypaper should pick this up as a dependency. You are now ready to go.

Usage

Figure 1

When you fire up anyPaper you will be surprised at how small the tool is. Remember, this is a front end for a fairly basic command, so it doesn’t require much. The main (and only) window has two tabs (see Figure 1). The first tab is where you configure your wallpaper. In this tab you can set the following:

File: The image you want to use as your wallpaper.

Style: Adjusted, Fullscreen, Tiled, Normal, Scaled, Custom Scaled. If you want to move an image to a specific spot on your desktop you must use Adjusted (and the image must be smaller than your actual desktop).

Background: Color to fill empty spaces.

Position x: The horizontal placement of your image.

Position y: The vertical placement of your image.

Width: Custom width.

Height: Custom height.Finally, on this tab, you can preview what your wallpaper will look like by hitting the Preview button. This only opens your wallpaper in a viewer window.

The second tab, Configuration, allows you to customize the wallpapersetter command line options. Here you can customize:

Default output file: This will be the file wallpapersetter uses as the actual wallpaper.

Command: Any command line options you want to use (see man wallpapersetter for a list of options).

Style: This is a list of four possible scaling options used in GTK from the gdk_pixbuf library.

Once you have made all the necessary adjustments click the Save As button (to save your options) and then click Apply. The Apply button will actually apply the wallpaper to your desktop.

Final thoughts

It’s not filled with tons of tools and it won’t rotate a directory full of wallpapers on your desktop. What anyPaper does, however, is place your wallpaper exactly where you want it on your desktop.  If you’re very picky about how your desktop looks, you might give anyPaper a try.

So, in this series I am going to introduce you to a few tools that will help you manage your desktop wallpaper on the Linux desktop. In this first article I am going to focus on a couple of aspects of GNOME wallpaper: Specifically, installing extra wallpaper and how to change your wallpaper directly from the Nautilus file browser.

Adding extra wallpaper

The stock GNOME installation comes with a few nice wallpapers. Most of them are fairly innocuous, and some can be considered artsy. But did you know you didn’t have to scour the web to add more wallpaper to your GNOME desktop? You can find more in good old Synaptic. That’s right. If you fire up Synaptic and do a search for “wallpaper” (no quotes), you will find plenty of extras to load up. For example:

• ubuntu-wallpapers-extra
• edgy-community-wallpapers
• edgy-wallpapers
• tropic-wallpapers
• gnome-backgrounds

Figure 1

You will also find wallpapers that install with specific themes as well. Once you have selected those packages for installation, click Apply to install. Now you can open up the Wallpaper manager (right click the desktop and select Change Desktop Background). Now, when you open up the background tab in the Appearances window (see Figure 1).

You will also notice a link in this tab labeled “Get more backgrounds online”. This is a great way to find new Linux-themed wallpaper. When you click that link it will open up your web browser to the http://art.gnome.org/backgrounds/ website where you can find plenty of outstanding wallpapers.

nautilus-wallpaper

There is, of course, a much easier way to set your desktop wallpaper in GNOME. Instead of having to open up the Appearance Properties window, you can install a simple Nautilus extension that will allow you to right click an image (within the Nautilus file manager) and select “Set As Wallpaper…”. To install this handy extension follow these steps:

1. Open up Synaptic.

2. Search for “wallpaper” (no quotes).

3. Find nautilus-wallpaper and mark for installation.

4. Click Apply to install.

5. Log out of GNOME.

6. Log back into GNOME.

You can now open up Nautilus and right-click any image and set it as your desktop background. You won’t be able to manipulate the image (like stretch, center, or tile), but you can set it as your background quickly.

Final thoughts

Of course there are plenty more wallpaper management tools out there. There are more tools that work with GNOME, some for KDE, and more. But no matter the tool (or desktop), you will have your Linux desktop personalized to suit your (or your company’s) needs.

The Photo Pools name is Wallpapers (1024×768 minimum) which should give you a good understanding of what you can expect. The minimum size of every picture of the group is 1024×768 although photos with a size of 1600×1200 are preferred.

You can start the wallpaper slideshow right here which loads a new tab in your browser starting with the first picture. Some options are available that influence the speed of the slideshow and the information that are shown on screen.

The tiny thumbnails at the bottom let you skip images. Remember you find more than 25000 images in the photo pool, this could take a while to see them all even on the fastest slideshow speed.

Width and height of the images vary between 1280*1024 and 1600*1200, there is however no way to find out about the original image size without clicking on the thumbnail which loads the full sized image.

The page could take some time to load if you are using a low speed connection, all thumbnails on that single page are about 2K which means that you will have to download about 2 megabytes before all thumbnails are displayed.

We are going to remove the arrow of the shortcuts icons first. Hit Windows + R and type regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\LNKFILE and delete the entry IsShortcut in the left pane. Next do the same at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PIFFILE, et voila the arrow is gone.

Making the desktop icons transparent is far easier. We are going to use the freeware Iconoid to do this. Start Iconoid after installation and click on disable drop shadows in the color tab if that button is available. The default setting is that the icon background is transparent which is exactly what we want. You might need to change the default text color as well if you are using backgrounds that have a similar color than the default font color.

Apply transparency by pressing and dragging the target (Dot next to Window Title field) crosshairs over the target window. You can also apply transparency by selecting the application from the dropdown menu.”