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Setting up animated wallpapers in Gnome / Cinnamon

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mikey
Posts: 15
Joined: 2013-03-05 12:36

Setting up animated wallpapers in Gnome / Cinnamon

#1 Post by mikey »

Hello,

I'm trying out Wheezy as a potential option for a more stable work experience. So one thing I felt I was missing was animated Wallpapers. There was a bit of difficulty in making these files work and also appear in the list of Backgrounds that I thought I would share here.

I find having a wallpaper that changes throughout the day can help give me a better sense of the progression of time throughout the day. The Default Wallpaper in Gnome Shell is an example of this, but it's not one that I think is particularly pleasing to look at.


I've been running Fedora and discovered a nice animated wallpaper is one that harks back all the way to Fedora 8. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wallpapers#Fedora_8

Image

I decided to try and make this wallpaper work together with a collection of others that I found on gnome-look.org

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/ ... ent=115006
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/ ... tent=93329

Image Image

There's also one for Fedora 19 that I'm not so keen on. Also it's not got an XML included so I think you would need to find it in the Fedora repos or create a new one. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wallpapers#Fedora_19

Image

So getting these to work.

For each you need to find (or make) a series of image files, a XML file and - the bit I couldn't find in any of the instructions - create a second XML document that tells Gnome Shell or Cinnamon where to find the background.

The first step is to save the images somewhere - I saved mine in a folder in /usr/share/backgrounds/ for example /usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/.

Then save the XML document that describes how the image transitions work - I just saved mine to the same folder as the images /usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay in the last example.

I then checked the image paths in that XML document - each source I found seemed to assume a different install path and none used relative paths which is what would seem to make sense to me. So in my previous example I had to change it to something like this for each of the many file references.

Code: Select all

	<from>/usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/0.png</from>
	<to>/usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/12.png</to>
Lastly I couldn't seem to just put the XML file in a folder checked by Gnome or Cinnamon, or browse for it and add it that way. I found I had to make a second XML file which I found worked in the /usr/share/gnome-background-properties folder. This file describes the previous XML file.

It looks like:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE wallpapers SYSTEM "gnome-wp-list.dtd">
<wallpapers>
  <wallpaper deleted="false">
    <name>DebianDay</name>
    <filename>/usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/DebianDay.xml</filename>
    <options>zoom</options>
    <shade_type>solid</shade_type>
    <pcolor>#3465a4</pcolor>
  </wallpaper>
</wallpapers>
I just copied this from the Default Desktop called Adwaita.xml and I'm not sure what many of the options are, but it seems to work. I've only tweaked <filename> and <name>. I saved mine as /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/DebianDay.xml

(edit) There was one extra step I missed if you happen to be using cinnamon (I'm not sure if this is even a good idea on Wheezy but like I said I'm using this install to spec these things out). Anyway the step is to link the Cinnamon background properties to the same folder as the Gnome one:

Code: Select all

sudo ln -s /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/ /usr/share/cinnamon-background-properties

User avatar
thanatos_incarnate
Posts: 717
Joined: 2012-11-04 20:36

Re: Setting up animated wallpapers in Gnome / Cinnamon

#2 Post by thanatos_incarnate »

For the sake of other people's bandwidth, use small thumbnails or plain links to the images,
don't display entire wallpapers here!

User avatar
dasein
Posts: 7680
Joined: 2011-03-04 01:06
Location: Terra Incantationum

Re: Setting up animated wallpapers in Gnome / Cinnamon

#3 Post by dasein »

^^ +1!!

Those bandwidth-guzzling full-screen monstrosities are totally unnecessary.

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