I have been searching for a good way to create a wallpaper slideshow. On Ubuntu 11.04 it was an easy job to make one using CreBS but CreBS doesn’t work on Ubuntu 11.10. And Wallch will only work with the program running, as soon as you close Wallch the slideshow stops working. Ubuntu 11.10 comes with a slideshow called Contest and the xml file is located in the /usr/share/backgrounds/contest folder. For some reason Ubuntu 11.10 doesn’t allow you to set your own .xml file as a background anymore.
To make any changes to the xml file open a terminal window (press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy+paste the following line:
sudo gedit /usr/share/backgrounds/contest/background-1.xml
When the file is open all you need to do is to replace the file locations with the locations of the images you want to use. To make any changes to the time a wallpaper is shown you can change the duration settings.
When you are done you can save and close the file and close the terminal window. To enable the slideshow press the SuperKey and type: appearance and select the Contest wallpaper slideshow.
Edited .xml file
Any suggestions on how to set the dimensions of the wallpaper in the .xml file, so that the image is not truncated when the image is a different shape from the screen (I have a 1600×900 screen, and want to use 1550×1300 cartoons as wallpaper, without losing the cartoon’s caption)?
Thanks.
Need to do some searching to see if that’s possible… Will let you know more when i know more 🙂
I did a bit of searching, but didn’t find a way of specifying the displayed image size in an .xml file.
I found a way round the problem, though: use a graphics programme to add a border – total image size with border 3200 x 2700, image size as before – the computer shrinks the image to fit the screen, and has better resolution than with a total image size of 1600 x 1350 and a half-size image.
The only thing i could find was for android but couldn’t find a way for Ubuntu to show the images without being resized. I was thinking about a similar way to edit the images…
Just get the XMLBACK nautilus script for Gnome3 here.