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
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
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
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.
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<from>/usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/0.png</from>
<to>/usr/share/backgrounds/DebianDay/12.png</to>
It looks like:
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<?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>
(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:
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sudo ln -s /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/ /usr/share/cinnamon-background-properties