gnome background, autorotation and cctools
February 25, 2008
In the afternoon on friday I spent some time playing with the autocurate tools from the Creative Commons tools. The Autocurate tool downloads the most recent ‘interesting’ pictures with creative commons licenses from flickr. It took a little bit of work to get it working but it got there.
Then this evening I started playing with the gnome-background rotation xml format.
I made a very very very simple python program to generate the xml file for rotating the images. You just run the program with its output to any xml file then you drag the xml file into the gnome-background changer window.
What I’m working on, now is a way to merge those two items a bit more and make it somewhat more seamless. So there are things I have questions about that maybe the LazyWeb knows more about:
1. is it possible to have the gnome-background-changer run a program to determine the image it should be displaying?
2. if not what is the best way to have a program run, per user, from time to time?
3. Has someone else already done this in a more trivial way?
4. Is the xml format for the image/rotation/transition documented anywhere other than the code?
February 25, 2008 at 6:00 am
[...] http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/gnome-background-autorotation-and-cctools/ asks Hoosgot, [...]
February 25, 2008 at 11:59 am
[...] answers at his post, not [...]
February 25, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I don’t know about “gnome-background-changer” (where does it come from?) but you can always change background by editing gconf key /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename. A bit more python code for calling gconftool-2 would do the trick.
February 25, 2008 at 5:29 pm
1. No.
2. Cron? or a user-daemon with timeout data?
3. I think there are a few alternate programs that randomize the wallpaper on log-in and other such tricks.
4. Not really, no. There is a DTD. And the gconf schema (installed by libgnome) might describe the behavior. I think the user documentation describes the behavior for the choices in the dialog, also. Scaled and Zoom both maintain aspect ratio. The only difference is Scaled fits inside the screen, and Zoom scales to fill the screen, and crop off extra parts of the image that would otherwise be beyond the screen. Everything else should be completely obvious in the naming.
February 25, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I currently use grotbckgd to change my background every 5 minutes, it’s just a shell script that uses gconftool: http://users.skynet.be/bk221183/
It’s scheduled through my crontab.
February 25, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Hi there!
I use a nifty program called “Wallpaper Tray”. It’s in the Ubuntu repository.
The background can be changed with a single click on the tray icon, on logon or be set with a timer.
February 26, 2008 at 6:10 am
You should check out Drapes: http://drapes.mindtouchsoftware.com/