[Solved] Setting a wallpaper in dwm on startup[O/S]

[TheInquisitor]

Hi!
I'm somewhat new to Linux. I have only been using it for a couple of weeks, and I have slowly been solving problems and tweaking my installation. I am currently on Debian 12, using lightdm with slick-greeter.
Currently I have been trying to set a wallpaper on startup, which would have be easy if I had kept xfce. However I switched to dwm. I understand how to apply a wallpaper to my desktop background, but I have had much difficulty having it persist on reboot. I first tried to place a pywal or feh command into my .xinitrc file that would apply a wallpaper, however this did not work. I think that this is because I do not start dwm through xinitrc, but through /usr/share/xsessions by using a .desktop file for it, but i'm not sure. I also tried bash scripting to run the command, crontab, variety, changing lightdm's config file, as well as using the rc.local script to start the command I need to run at boot in order to apply the wallpaper. These attempts did not work either, most likely because I did something wrong.
I also messed around with the dwm autostart patch, but I honestly don't know how to configure it.

So as of right now i'm kinda at a loss. I've been trying to troubleshoot this for a week straight with no luck. Would somebody have an idea as to what I should do to apply a wallpaper on startup? Thanks for your time.

[None1975]

Hello.

I also messed around with the dwm autostart patch, but I honestly don't know how to configure it.

You don't need it at all

Create .xsessionrc file with these contents:

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#!/bin/bash

~/.fehbg

make this file executable:

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chmod +x ~/.xsessionrc

Logout and login again.

P.S.

This way, using this file, you can specify the programs you want to start when you start a graphics session.

Keep in mind that some apps need to run in the background. Therefore, you need to add & to their name

Good luck.

[TheInquisitor]

Thanks that worked like a charm!

Ill mark the post as solved. However I have a quick newbie question. When I was writing the command I wanted into the ~/.xsessionrc file I first tried using pywal using "wal -R". This did not work, so I then looked closer at what you had suggested to do, and saw that you provided a file path for the command. I tried that instead with pywal and bam, worked instantly. I would like to understand why you have to specify a file path for the command, if you would care to explain.

Again thanks for the help

[None1975]

Thanks that worked like a charm!

I would like to understand why you have to specify a file path for the command, if you would care to explain.

Path name really means the full path to that file or folder from the filesystem's / directory. For example, the full path to your script is:

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/home/your_username/my_script

The root directory

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/

it is the starting point of *nix based operating systems. It contains all the other directories both system's and user's.

More info here

Good luck.