Re: Updating the background image

["Mike Williams" <dmikewilliams gmail com>]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Jason D. Triolo <jasonacg 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