TechSource: How to Automatically Dress Up Your Linux Desktop with Awesome Wallpapers

How to Automatically Dress Up Your Linux Desktop with Awesome Wallpapers

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 01:29 AM PDT

They say that variety is the spice of life. We are all looking for some novelty in our daily lives. We all know that small, positive changes in our lives make a whole lot of difference. Similarly if you spend a lot of time staring at your computer's monitor, I'm sure you must be tired of looking at the same wallpaper all day. We all need that daily dose of inspiration stuck right on our computer screen.

For Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint users, the default set of wallpapers is good enough for anyone who is looking for a gorgeous desktop. The community-made wallpapers are quite spectacular compared to what we had on the desktop a few years ago. However, if you are looking for something out of the ordinary, you'll need to look in other places. Thankfully, though, there is a great app you can install that will allow you to change the look of your Linux desktop every day and that too automatically.

But first we have to find to find some awesome wallpapers for your Linux desktop. Personally, I find interfacelift as one of the best places to find free wallpapers. The site lets you choose from a plethora of great wallpapers that fit perfectly with your desktop. When you download an image you don't have to worry whether it will look good with your desktop resolution. The site automatically fetches your resolution and recommends you the wallpaper that will fit your desktop. The images they provide are high-resolution images and are beautifully shot by professional photographers.

Another good source for wallpapers is Flickr. This Yahoo!-owned image sharing site has a lot of CC-licensed images that you can download for free. Just search for what you're looking for with a CC-search filter.

Last, but not the least, Wallbase is a fabulous place to look for new wallpapers. The site lets you search for new wallpapers and also lets you search for them using tags. The site also has a strong community that often comes up with customizations of the default set of wallpapers.

How to automatically change wallpapers:

Ubuntu already has a feature that lets you shuffle between the default set of wallpapers. To access that option, right click on the desktop and choose Change Desktop Background. Then, choose the wallpaper with a clock-like emblem on it to periodically keep shuffling between the default set of wallpapers.

However, if you want more features and options, I recommend that you install Variety Wallpaper Changer. To install Variety on Ubuntu, type in or paste the following commands in your terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peterlevi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install variety

Variety is a fully featured wallpaper changer for the Linux desktop. Available for Ubuntu via a PPA, this software automatically switches between different wallpapers and lets you customize the variations as well. One of the best features of this application is that it automatically fetches new wallpapers from the Internet every day from Flickr, Wallbase.cc, and Wallpapers.net. Not only that, you can set Variety to apply filters to the images, add a digital clock, and more. Another cool feature that this app provides is that it fetches some great quotes from QuoteDaddy and overlays them on top of wallpapers thus giving you something great to reflect upon every single day.