Dynamic linux wallpapers from Civilization V
Sid Meier's Civilization V is a great turn-based strategy game, and it comes with a bunch of great paintings, spread all around the game. This tool allows you to extract those, and to use them as your wallpaper for your favourite Linux distro.
You must have a legit copy of Civilization V installed on your computer to use this program.
Installation and configuration
In order to install this tool, be sure to have Civilization V installed on your computer, along with Python 3 and ImageMagick (you can find those in your distro's repositories). Then install the tool with PIP:
$ sudo pip install civ5-wallpapers
Finally, you can use the interactive setup to get everything working: just type this command:
$ civ5-wallpapers setup
It will try to extract the wallpapers from the game files, and ask you if you want to put them in a slideshow. Then you're ready to go!
Instead, if you want to have control on what happens, you can use the low-level commands.
Extracting the wallpapers from the game files
The tool doesn't come with the wallpapers bundled with it. You need to get those from the game files. Doing that is simple as executing this command:
$ civ5-wallpapers extract
By default the tool looks for the game files in the Steam directories: if you
installed it another way, you can provide the path of the game resources with
the --game-dir PATH flag.
The command may take a while to execute. After it finishes, all the wallpapers
will be located in ~/.cache/civ5-wallpapers. If you want to change the output
directory use the --output PATH flag.
Updating the wallpaper
To update the wallpaper, you can execute this command:
# With GNOME
$ civ5-wallpaper set-random gnome
# With Unity
$ civ5-wallpaper set-random unity
Currently, only the unity and gnome desktop environments are supported. If
you want to contribute support for another DE please send a pull request!
You can execute this every hour by adding this line to the crontab:
# With GNOME
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/civ5-wallpapers set-random gnome
# With Unity
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/civ5-wallpapers set-random unity