Using Wikipedia’s Picture of the Day as wallpaper

This is via the ubuntu-women mailing list; the request was a way to set Gnome’s wallpaper to the Wikipedia Picture of the Day, using a user-made site that feeds the image every day.

I’m not too sure how Gnome would work (I suspect gconftool -s would be involved), but with Openbox and feh, it’s a very simple trick.

You could set this up as a script to run, but it should work in your .xinitrc file as well.

wget http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/potd/potd.php/commons/1600x1200
feh --bg-scale potd-1600x1200.jpg

If I understand it correctly, the file name is always potd-1600x1200.jpg, so you’ll probably overwrite the file each time it’s wgetted. (There’s a --no-clobber option for wget, if I recall correctly.) If you see one you want to keep, you should probably copy it to a new file and give it a proper name.

10 thoughts on “Using Wikipedia’s Picture of the Day as wallpaper

  1. Will

    Here is the string needed for gnome. Great tip.

    gconftool -t string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ~/potd-1600×1200.jpg

    Reply
  2. K.Mandla Post author

    Could you be more specific? I’m kind of at the mercy of WordPress.com here, so I don’t know if I can promise much.

    Reply
  3. Pingback: fbterm, meet Wikipedia’s POTD « Motho ke motho ka botho

  4. JP Senior

    Edit your crontab to pull this every 12 hours or so… whatever you like 🙂
    crontab -e;

    * */12 * * * wget http://toolserver.org/~daniel/potd/potd.php/commons/full -O /home/sartan/desktop-background.jpg

    Then tell gnome to simply point to this location:
    gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “$HOME/desktop-background.jpg”

    The instructions above will only work once every login.
    Gnome will automatically redo your desktop when the file changes.
    Enjoy!!

    Reply
    1. gullars

      Well that means that you have to have gnome installed, and I don`t see any reason to, when feh is both simpler and lighter than that..

      Reply

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