Simple dynamic wallpaper script for setting GNOME desktop wallpaper based on
time of day. The appropriate image in images/ named (HOUR).png is chosen at
every time the script is called.
The script only sets the wallpaper and depends on cron to run regularly.
Default collection of wallpapers in images/ are taken from The 25th Hour by Louis Coyle. The animation was played in full screen in Google Chrome with photos taken at 1 to 2s intervals (highly irregular and manual).
Images are NOT part of the MIT Licence. Only the scripts are.
Inspired by dynamic-wallpaper, but I wanted something that worked as a cron job instead of constantly running.
Firstly, identify some program that is guaranteed to be running in a GNOME
session. This might be gnome-session itself, or a compositor like picom or
compton. Then, replace GSESSION_PROGRAM=compton in dynwall.sh with your
program, like so: GSESSION_PROGRAM=<your program>.
This is required because when run by cron, we need to use some trickery
to get the DBUS_SESSION_BUSADDRESS in order to use gsettings to set the
wallpaper.
Add the following line to your crontab:
1 * * * * /path/to/dynwall/dynwall.sh
We set the job to run at minute 1, so that there is no chance of any mistake
with cron triggering the job just before the hour and date +"%H" returning the
previous hour.
Since cron only runs this at the start of every hour, you should also call dynwall by adding dynwall to your startup applications suitable for your desktop environment. If you do not, the wallpaper will not be properly set at login. For example, if you are using i3, run it with exec in your i3config.
To trigger manually, run dynwall.sh directly. The cron job will ensure it updates every hour.
If using watch or some other program to call the script regularly, there is no
need to set GSESSION_PROGRAM. Simply add something like
watch -n 300 /path/to/dynwall/dynwall.sh
to some init file (not tested).
Simply fill the images folder with your choice of wallpapers from 00.png to 23.png, corresponding to the hour you want them to appear. Symlinks are allowed; in fact the default ones are symlinks to a collection of screenshots in images/all.
- GNOME based desktop environment