Rotating Wallpapers in Ubuntu

For those like me who have an extensive collection of wallpapers and they do not want to be changing those wallpapers one by one manually, Ubuntu long ago it gave us the possibility to create our own rotating wallpapers, sure, but how?

We can do it in two ways.

1) One would be taking the rotating wallpaper as an example Cosmos which already comes by default in the Ubuntu installation.

To do this, we will enter nautilus in root mode to the folder where this type of wallpapers is located.

So, we press Alt + F2 and in the execution field we enter the following command:

gksudo nautilus / usr / share / backgrounds /

We enter the folder /cosmos/ and within it we find the following files.

What interests us in our case is the file background-1.xml, which is the file where we will define the wallpapers that we will use, the transition time between them and the time to display each one.

We then return to the folder / backgrounds / and we create a new folder, eg. /Dawn/.

From the folder /cosmos/ we copy only the file background-1.xml and we rename it eg. Aurora.xml and we move it to the folder /Dawn/.

In this folder we also copy the wallpapers that we want to rotate, in my case I had the following:

We open the file Aurora.xml with some editor, eg. Gedit and we begin to modify it, we change the location and name of the file and the times, this will allow us to know the variables that are used in this XML file for transitions, times, etc. which will help us to do something more elaborate later or simply to know.

In my case the file is as follows Aurora.xml

Here I put the Aurora folder So that you can download and analyze it as an example, remember that if you want to copy it to your system, it must be in: / usr / share / backgrounds /.

Finally to activate it we right-click on the desktop, select the option Change the desktop background and on the lapel Background select Add, we select the option All the files and we go to the folder where we save our XML file, in my case / usr / share / backgrounds / Aurora /, and select the file Aurora.xml and voila !! our ready-to-use rotating wallpaper.

2) The other alternative is to download this simple package to create these types of wallpapers, it is called XML Slideshow Maker and what it does is simply create the XML file with the data of the wallpapers and the sample and transition times.

To use it, we select the folder where our wallpapers are located, we define the name of the XML file and the sample and transition times. Finally we can define right there to apply the rotating wallpaper created at the same moment.

Sure, this is the simplest and fastest way, but at least now you know how those colorful rotating wallpapers are generated that give that particular touch to your desktop.