Random Background Images

Posted by treed@surreality.us on 2003-08-02 00:00:00

I got bored the other day and wanted to see if I could set up a way to randomly change the background image in GNOME from a directory of jpg files.

After a bit of experimentation, I came up with this:

gconftool -t str -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "`find "$BACKGROUND_DIR" -name \*.jpg | random | tail -n 1`"

It recursively searches $BACKGROUND_DIR for *.jpg, and randomly picks one, then sets the background to it. I've noticed that the random command isn't very random, but it works. I thought about adapting the weighted random algorithm I use in one of my IRC bots, as a fix. Perhaps another day.

Oh, and for some more fun, you can stick that command (you may need to replace "$BACKGROUND_DIR" with the actual directory), in a cronjob, to run say, once daily, or hourly.