Slowly changing the background in XFCE
Google is always helpful of course, so I’ve found this blog entry on how to set the background in xfce.
It boils down to setting a jpg
in XFCE’s backdrops.list and then
reloading xfdesktop
. Crude, but it works.
This can de done with the following command:
cat <<EOF > ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/backdrops.list
# xfce backdrop list
background.jpg
EOF
And then
xfdesktop --reload
However when running from CRON it is more easy to do a
killall -USR1 xfdesktop
.
A collage from ATComputing, Jacques loonen had a little script that will download a nice image from some site showing the earth with actual clouds rendered on it. I’m going to use it to make a background that slowly changes from day into night and vice verse.
The following script wil be run from cron, it will generate a new
jpg
suitable for background use. Images from
opentopia.com
are particularly nice.
#!/bin/sh
IMG=/home/miekg/tmp/xfce_bg.jpg
wget \
http://www.opentopia.com/images/cams/world_sunlight_map_hemisphere.jpg \
-O $IMG
# not really needed, but... heh
cat <<EOF > ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/backdrops.list
# xfce backdrop list
$IMG
EOF
killall -USR1 xfdesktop
The # xfce backdrop list
comment seems to necessary to make it all work.
CRON⌗
CRON
is the most natural fit to download new images. So save the
script to a place where it can be found, say in ~/bin/xfcebg
and
edit your user cron entry with crontab -e
and put something like
this in there
*/5 * * * * $HOME/bin/xfcebg
That’s it!
Didn’t like it⌗
The whole scaling seems to be a bit off and the earth image is way too white, so I’m already back on my go’old background :-)