Rotating desktop wallpapers (Page 2 of 3)

This is awesome. I love it.

Question though...I noticed that Nitrogen has command-line options for "Best" but it doesn't seem to work when called from the script. Also, when I start up the GUI for nitrogen there is an option for "Zoomed" which seems to best suit the particular wallpapers I like. This doesn't appear to be supported in the cl version though. Is there a way around this?

Hmm, I am not running Nitrogen at the moment and so I cannot test this, but what arguments did you try? Do either of these work?

--set-auto

^ for best? Or:

--set-zoom

^ for zoomed.

I get "Unexpected argument" for both those. Other options call up the GUI, which is sort of fun.

Looks like an oops in nitrogen.

^ I am glad you found it useful!

Well, I wanted to find a version of this script that worked for doing a centered wallpaper (a request of a friend who I got into #!, whom now loves it), but alas, none of the ones that offered that worked.  I decided to do it myself.

I think I may have improved upon this code a bit as well beyond that.  I added a zenity-based graphical interface for easy rotations outside of the usual crontab automated one, and as such, I call it zen-rotate.

/bin/zen-rotate:

#!/bin/sh

##
#  zen-rotate
#
#   version 1.0
#   A nitrogen based script for wallpaper slideshows from a target directory 
#   with a zenity based user interface. 
#
#   by Kevin Mason <kmason@bloodstar.net>
#      http://bloodstar.net/
#
#   This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
#   For more info see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
##

help(){
echo "This program uses nitrogen to make a wallpaper slideshow from a target directory, with zenity for optional GUI."
echo "Usage: zen-rotate -h -g -c -s."
echo "Options: One option is required, but only one will be allowed."
echo "Entering a second option will result in only the first being read."
echo " -h: Displays this dialog."
echo " -g: Use a graphical user interface."
echo " -c directory: Set the scaling to centered for the target directory."
echo " -s directory: Set the scaling to scaled for the target directory."
exit 1
}

if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
    help
fi

while getopts 'hgc:s:' OPTION
do 
    case $OPTION in
    c) WALLPAPERS="$OPTARG";SCALING=centered;;
    s) WALLPAPERS="$OPTARG";SCALING=scaled;;
    g) . $HOME/.config/zen-rotate/ui;;
    h) help;;
    ?) help;;
    esac
done

file=`/bin/ls -1 "$WALLPAPERS" | sort --random-sort | head -1`
path=`readlink --canonicalize "$WALLPAPERS/$file"` # Converts to full path
nitrogen --set-$SCALING --save $path

/home/user/.config/zen-rotate/ui

#!/bin/sh

## User Interface for zen-rotate

## Initialize first zenity interface, a list for choosing the scaling type.
SCALING=$(zenity  --list  --text "Choose your Scaling Type." --radiolist \
--column "Pick" --column "Type" \
TRUE scaled FALSE centered);

## Initialize the second zenity interface, a file selection dialog for selecting
## the wallpaper directory.
WALLPAPERS=$(zenity  --file-selection  --title="Choose your Target Directory." --directory);

Usage:

GUI

zen-rotate -g

CLI (Centered)

zen-rotate -c /path/to/directory

CLI (Scaled)

zen-rotate -s /path/to/directory

Hi everyone,

this is my first post on crunchbang forum. I'm also a first time crunchbang and openbox installer. As Debian enthusiast, I enjoied "Statler" and I'm quite happy with it but I got some problems in succeding to rotate desktop wallpaper with these scripts. I have some questions:

Where have I to save these scripts?
How have I to edit these scripts with my images folder path?
How have I to edit autostart.sh to invoke these scripts?

Sorry you find my questions stupid. And sorry for my bad English...

Last edited by CaSt (2010-06-21 12:44:04)

and to execute something not in the $PATH, you can just use the full location, e.g. /home/yourname/imagescript.sh

Someone else asked the same thing:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/44679/#p44679

This script is worked in centered  wallpaper. A zenity based graphical interface is easy to use for rotation. Zen rotate is very useful code for rotating desktop wallpapers.

I took Tawan's script and modified it a little to read into subdirectories and gather images.  I have ~84 images which I received in 4 zip files - I'm not going to throw them all into one big folder!  Therefore, Tawan's script didn't do the trick.  Therefore, I came up with this script:

#!/bin/bash
WALLPAPERS="/home/chiraag/Pictures/backgrounds"
find $WALLPAPERS -type f -name "*.jpg" | sed -e 's/\/home\/chiraag\/Pictures\/backgrounds\///' | sed -e 's/ /\\ /g'> $WALLPAPERS/files.txt
RANGE=`wc -l $WALLPAPERS/files.txt | sed -e 's/\/home\/chiraag\/Pictures\/backgrounds\/files.txt//'`
let "range = $RANGE"
let "number = $RANDOM"
let LASTNUM="`cat $WALLPAPERS/.last` + $number"
let "number = $LASTNUM % $RANGE"
echo $number > $WALLPAPERS/.last
cd $WALLPAPERS
FILE=`sed -n "$number p" files.txt`
echo $FILE
nitrogen --set-scaled --save $FILE

Enjoy!

I used the following line added to crontab to cycle all the wallpapers in ~/images/wallpapers/ every minute.

* * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 nitrogen --set-scaled "$(find ~/images/wallpapers/ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" |sort -R |tail -1)"

Here is the breakdown:
1. DISPLAY=:0.0 #Sets the display
2. nitrogen --set-scaled #Calls nitrogen with the flag to set to scaled.
3. "$( #Opens bash scripting
4. find ~/images/wallpapers/ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.png" #Calls find in the wallpapers directory looking for files that end in .jpg or .png and is case insensitive. Find outputs a list.
5. sort -R #Sorts the list randomly
6. tail -1 #Takes the last item in the list.

The only problem I have with this method and using nitrogen in general is that the wallpaper redraw causes a flash over any application. It's brief and often barely noticeable, but it's enough to be distracting when I'm coding. I'll file a bug with nitrogen, but that guy seems to be pretty busy anyway.

Good luck crunchbangers! I hope this helps.