Automatically changing Background Wallpaper in XFCE4

flori@ping.de (flori) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:41:00 +0200

I recently switched from the good, old trusty WindowMaker to XFCE4 as a window manager/desktop environment.

Before the switch I used xsetbg in the crontab to change my background from the standard wallpaper of my theme to another image every hour. Now I configured Desktop Preferences -> Image -> New list to create a list of desktop images to choose from. But how to swtich every hour or at all? xsetbg stopped to work under XFCE4 for some reason. It's also strange, that you can configure a list in XFCE4, but it is only used once after login in.

The solution

Put this line into your crontab:

0 * * * * killall -USR1 xfdesktop

This will reload xfdesktop's configuration and also switch to a new backdrop image. Yeah, it's that easy, but it took me a while to figure it out.

There is also the xfdesktop -reload command, but I had some problems to connect to the X server from the crond. Maybe this is caused by my paranoid X configuration, though.

The Rubylution: Automatically changing Background Wallpaper in XFCE4

Automatically changing Background Wallpaper in XFCE4

The solution