Cannot Switch Wallpaper Periodically

User Support
1

I want to have the wallpaper change every 10 minutes. I have a group of screenshots collected from within dom0 itself that I wish to use. Since they are native screenshots, they are safe to use. The desktop settings dialog, however, will not change the wallpaper no matter what I do. I selected the directory where my wallpapers were located from the drop down menu and even copied some of them over into /usr/share/backgrounds, but I cannot get the wallpaper to change from the default. If I try to browse for a directory, everything is greyed out; even the other default background directories. Any idea where I’m going wrong. Running the i3 window manager, Qubes version R4.0

2

i3 is pretty minimalistic and does likely not provide such functionality out of the box. You probably have to write a script to do this. Look online how to do this in i3 or any other tiling window manager.

3

Shouldn’t it be /usr/share/backgrounds/images, not /usr/share/backgrounds.

4

You can use the tool feh, if you’re comfortable installing it in dom0.

Use cron to run a wallpaper script every ten minutes. Run crontab -e and add this to your crontab:

*/10 * * * * user /home/user/wallpaper.sh

Where wallpaper.sh might be something like:

#!/bin/bash

BG_DIR="/home/user/Pictures"
BG=$(ls /home/user/Pictures | shuf -n1)
feh --bg-scale "$BG_DIR/$BG"

This will give you randomization that’s as good as shuf, and won’t keep track of the previous wallpaper. But for a lot of images you shouldn’t get repeats very often.

5

I eventually gave up trying to do this with i3. I was able to change wallpapers finally with Nitrogen, but it doesn’t provide slideshow functionality.

Xfce however works just fine with rotating backgrounds and to my surprise, allows for limited window transparency via the Window Manager Tweaks program, something I had been struggling to get working with i3.

Figured the transparency and rotating wallpaper features were worth the sacrifice, so I decided to go back to the defaults.

6

I see it’s been solved already but in any case, here’s a link to a guide I made a while ago:

Also, I’ve changed the title to be a bit more specific to what you where asking @jpbaiocchi