On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Jason D. Triolo <jasonacg(a)citicom.com> wrote:
Sjoerd Mullender wrote:
> Perhaps you can use (one line, all but last argument as is):
>
> gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename
/path/to/file.jpg
Unfortunately, this didn't help. In order for the image to change, I have to
right-click on the desktop and select "Change Desktop Background."
Interesting, on my system the desktop changes immediately when I use
the command that Sjoerd suggested.
At first it didn't work, then I realized was running as root and had
changed the background for the root user, which had no effect because
X was running as a different user.
When running as the user I use when I run startx the background
changed right away.
Did a bit more tinkering to try to replicate your problem, and found
something that may help. I noticed that the contents of
~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/background contains a timestamp. If I just
copied a new image to the same filename as the old image nothing
happened and I got the same results as you did. However, if I first
touched the file, then copied the image and then ran gconftool the
image changed right away.
The key seems to be to use the sequence of: touch, cp, then gconftool-2
To test this out I wrote a perl program to cycle through a directory
of images and ran it as a cron job and it worked fine.
BTW - this was on a fedora 7 box.
Mike