Desktop Backgrounds

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jeremy Turner wrote:
> Hi all,

Hey Jeremy,

> Anyway, I have googled and tried to look at this lists' archive with not
> much luck, but I'm trying to find out how to programmatically change the
> XFCE 4 desktop background.  The only thing I could find in the
> documentation is to use the Settings box, and that XFCE 4 conforms to
> the XDesktop (or something) standard.
> 
> What I'm doing is I have a script that calls xplanet and then generates
> a new desktop background every 30 minutes and then sets the new
> background.  In Gnome, I called gconfd and set a registry value.  I
> tried a xsetbg command, but that didn't seem to have any effect in XFCE
> 4.
> 
> Any ideas?

Here an quick-and-dirty one:

Say for example you use ~/bg.jpg for the background in the xfdesktop 
configuration. Now your script should look like this:

#!/bin/sh
# (remember to set DISPLAY if this is run from cron or similar services)
#
# Copy the new wallpaper (generated prior to this in ~/new.jpg)
cp ~/new.jpg ~/bg.jpg

# Notify xfdesktop to reload wallpaper
pkill -USR1 xfdesktop


That should do the job. (You may need to use killall instead of pkill if your 
system lacks the pkill command).

> Jeremy

Benedikt

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