This guide will show you how to have your wallpaper changing automatically using a program called Drapes. Either search for it online and install it via directions given, or open up your package manager (like Synaptic) and search for drapes, then mark it for installation (or sudo apt-get install drapes in the terminal). Once installed, don’t be surprised if you don’t find a launcher for it anywhere; this doesn’t matter as you can start it via the terminal, configure it, and have it load each time Ubuntu does.
Once installed, open a terminal, type drapes and hit Enter. You will now see a little icon near the system tray clock (should look like a monitor with curtains). Right-click that and choose Preferences.
In the first tab, Display, you will see you can +Add and -Remove wallpapers, so browse to any folders with wallpapers and select those you want included. To select all in a folder, click on one and then Ctrl+A to select all. To make building your list easier, you could even create a new folder just for these, then browse all your pictures and wallpapers folders and copy your favourites into this new folder, then just import all those in the one folder to the list in Drapes. Not only does doing this beforehand make it easier for adding the wallpapers all at once, you can also get Drapes to check for changes to a folder, so it makes sense to have a folder for this purpose.
While you are on the Display tab, you will also see that you can change the Style via a drop-down menu. These display modes are Centered, Fill Screen, Scaled, Tiled, and Zoom. You may want to play around with this if you have many pictures that aren’t exactly your screen size and shape (especially if you have a widescreen display).
In the second tab, General, you will see Startup options, and you select “Switch wallpaper on start” if desired. You will also see the autostart option “Start Desktop Drapes on start“, but if you check that don’t be surprised if Drapes doesn’t load by itself on the next reboot. But don’t worry, as a built-in feature of Ubuntu makes it easy to add anything to the boot process. But for now, we just need to configure Drapes before shutting it down properly (as closing the terminal will close down Drapes but not save any of the new settings).
Now, you’ll see you can change the “Timing selection“, which means the interval between changes. The default should be 15 mins, but you can lower it to 5 mins or as high as 2 hours.
At the bottom you will see “Wallpaper search directory” where you can check “Monitor this directory for new wallpapers“. If you check that, you can then browse for your wallpaper folder and select that; after that, you can just add new pictures and wallpapers into that folder, and you won’t need to import them manually (new wallpapers might not get noticed till the next reboot).
To make sure everything you’ve just done is saved, you will need to manually exit. Right-click the Drapes icon in your panel and choose Quit. If you close the terminal first, the settings will be lost; once you’ve quit properly, you can close the terminal (you will note it says the settings have been saved).
Finally, to have it start with each boot, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications, click the +Add button, and fill in the info (for Name, you can put Drapes; the Command is simply drapes, and for Comment you can put Wallpaper Changer).
Upon your next reboot, Drapes will load and continue to do so until you disable it.
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Well, I hate to disagree with you but Drapes does not load on startup after it has been added to Startup Applications. Nice little app, though. I just wish I could figure out a way to get it to start with Ubuntu.
You can “disagree”, but obviously you’ve done something wrong if you can’t get it to load at startup. No PC I’ve set it up on has had any problems, so while I wouldn’t rule out something being incompatible with Drapes, I’d bet you missed some small detail. I’d make sure the command wasn’t placed in comments section, etc. If you give more info, I can try and help.
No, actually I did do it right so it is not “obvious”, as you infer. The application set itself up and left the comments section blank. The command was simply “drapes”, without the quotes, of course. It didn’t work. So I changed the command to /usr/bin/drapes. Didn’t work. Both command forms work from the command line in the terminal. “Desktop Drapes” is located in the Graphics menu and “drapes” is in the command entry in the command box. Double-clicking on the icon launches the app.
So everything works except the autostart. I am not a Linux or Ubuntu expert but I have been working with computers for 30 years so I’m not fresh out of the box. And, while I don’t always get things right the first time, I am rather fastidious insofar as if it doesn’t work, I double check what I did. And I find out what the problem. I’m still working on this one. Maybe it’s some kind of hardware issue with my laptop. I don’t know. Drapes just doesn’t start up from Startup Applications like it should.
If it isn’t due to an error on your part (hey, I make silly mistakes myself when I’m not particularly paying attention!), then I am at a loss. Even though I didn’t let Drapes add itself to startup (or more that it couldn’t do so successfully on my system), and did it manually, there shouldn’t be any difference, as the command should simply be “drapes”. So unless something is really amiss with your system in regards to startup applications, I’d have to venture that Drapes is in fact trying to load at startup, but something is preventing it… or it loads, then crashes again due to whatever is conflicting with it.
That might explain why you can run it from a terminal – and I assume launcher if you had one for it – after your startup apps have loaded. Oh, I see you do have a launcher, which is kind of weird, since no launcher was created anywhere on my system (or on a couple of other PCs I set it up on). I certainly have nothing for it in the Graphics menu (and you should only need to single-click menu items). My version is 0.5.2 – what do you have (I assume the same, since it was the last version)? And did you compile it from source, or get a .deb installer?
Well, it certainly is strange, but at least you can run it manually. I’ve had apps that only survived loading at startup about 50% of the time, and it’s not that big a deal to click a launcher. Still, it would be good to find out the cause, so if you come across it, let me know.
Yes, it certainly is strange because I think I tried Drapes over a year and a half ago on 8.04 with the same result. I ended up using wallpaper-tray but it wasn’t without its quirks. This time (and I’m running 0.5.2 also) I found a suggestion somewhere in cyber space that I try delaying the start in case something might be interfering with Drapes starting up. The command (if I recall it correctly) suggested is:
bash -c “sleep xx; /usr/bin/drapes” – where xx is the sleep or delay time in seconds.
It didn’t work either nor did replacing “/usr/bin/drapes” with just “drapes”.
So it seems I’m at an impasse.
Well, I got it working. Here’s the deal…
There’s a folder in the Home directory called .config and in it is a folder called “autostart”. In “autostart” is a file called “drapes.desktop”. Opening it with gedit reveals:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Drapes
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Exec=bash -c “sleep 10; drapes”
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Comment[en_US]=Desktop wallpaper changer
Comment=Desktop wallpaper changer
The problem with my file is that “Type=Application” was missing. Obviously a bug in Ubuntu. I entered that line and added the “sleep 10” line in “Exec=”, rebooted and, voila! drapes loaded.
I thought you’d like to know and perhaps if anyone else mentions the same problem, you can tell them how to fix it. :)
Hi, and good to see you sorted it out. That’s a good bit of supplemental info I’ll add to the post, in case anyone ever needs it. Not sure what caused that, whether it was created by Drapes (since it added itself to startup, whereas I did mine manually), or as you say, perhaps even a bug within Ubuntu (though if it can’t be replicated by adding other programs to startup, then I’d assume the former).
A note of interest, possibly related to how Drapes got added to startup: I have 2 files in ~/.config/autostart – drapes-2.desktop and Drapes. I’m running 9.10, but even if you run an earlier version, we both have the same version of Drapes.
Obviously even though all info in the dialogue box in Starup Applications looked fine, something was amiss with the .desktop file, and since it has a different name to mine, I’m wondering if this has to do with Drapes adding itself (unsuccessfully) to startup (as I said, I had to do it manually, as I never even got it appearing among the startup apps).
Out of curiosity, did you delete the Drapes entry entirely from Startup Applications, then create a new one from scratch, at any stage? If not, too late now to see if that would have done the trick, but we’re actually more the wiser now since you had to go poking into config files. Thanks again for sharing that info! Cheers
Weird. My .desktop files have different data, but that might be due to different versions of Ubuntu? Anyway, Drapes when opened in Gedit shows drapes.desktop in the titlebar, so that sorts that out, and this is the data:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Drapes
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Exec=drapes
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
drapes-2.desktop has this:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Drapes
Exec=drapes
Icon=system-run
Comment=Wallpaper Changer
Looks like the info is spread across 2 config files on my system.
I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 also so it can’t be the OS and, since we also have the same version of Drapes, it is just weird. I might mention that when I installed it I used Synaptic rather than typing out the commands via the terminal. From the article I read on the net regarding the “Type=”, the example given looked like your “drapes-2.desktop” entry, except the app was different. Now your other entry looks like mine did before I edited it. Here’s something to try; move your first entry out of the autostart folder and reboot. Does Drapes load? Put it back and move the other entry out. Does Drapes load? I’d bet one of them doesn’t work and it’s probably not the “drapes-2.desktop” file. You can probably trash the one that doesn’t work. Perhaps you could also try renaming “drapes-2.desktop” to “drapes.desktop”.
The other weird thing is that I’ve got two comment lines in my file. Not that I give a hoot but I wonder where that came from.
On a completely different topic, I used to run 8.04 on my laptop which is a Toshiba Satellite A30. It has no internal wireless so I use a D-Link PCMCIA card. With 8.04 I had to install Madwifi and recompile the kernel. It worked okay (not great) until last July. Then it didn’t work anymore. It looked like it was working but I could not connect to my router. I suspect a kernel or some other update screwed it up. Returning to the older kernel didn’t work. I tried installing 9.04 but the OS couldn’t find the cardbus. Same problem with 8.10. So I went back to 8.04 and thought I’d reinstall Madwifi sometime. I never got around to it and lived with a cable until recently
A few weeks ago a friend suggested I try Fedora 12 beta Live CD. I booted it and my wireless card worked. So, when Fedora 12 was released I installed it on my laptop expecting wonderful wireless results. No dice. The cardbus wasn’t recognized. I tried Ubuntu 9.10. Same thing.
Now, I should mention that to install an OS on my laptop I need to issue the acpi=off command on the kernel command line or I just can’t install it. After researching the issue on the net for a couple of days I downloaded a really handy list of kernel commands from a Gentoo site. I came across two interesting commands: nolapic and noapic. Issuing those on the startup line solved my laptop wireless issues and life is good.
For your information, noapic disables the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller that is present on newer motherboards. It has been known to cause some problems on older hardware. And nolapic disables the local APIC on Uniprocessor kernels. Since my laptop is about 7 years old, it made sense to try these options and they seem to be the solution.
An interesting thing is that when I used 8.04 power management didn’t work. Now, with those two kernel options my wireless works and so does power management. Can’t be any better.
Sorry for the long post but I thought you might find the account of my adventures with hardware on Ubuntu useful information. I’m sure other people have experienced similar problems.
Thanks for your comments and Merry Christmas.
Bob-El,
Your solution fixed my drapes startup issues as well. :)
Thank you Bob-El! Your solution worked perfectly for me as well. This little startup issue was driving me nuts as well. I tried the other wallpaper changer and was disgusted at how it displayed a thumbnail of the current desktop wallpaper in my panel. Drapes was the ultimate solution except for the startup issue. Now, everything is cherry! Thanks a lot!
@bob e
Please, Please PLEASE don’t ever say “It can’t be this” because it can and probably WILL be that. Remember how distros work, please. They are nothing more than a different pieces of software on your disk so just like with mechanical items, the more there is the higher the chance of something going wrong somewhere. Welcome to bugs. No one or nothing is immune from them.
Matt
Thanks! Fixed the problem for me too.
I found an easier method to get it to start. If you right click desktop drapes under preferences. you will have an option to add the launcher to desktop. once you do this you right click this and select properties. From there you will see that the command isn’t drapes, but drapes –tray . you then go to startup applications and change the command to this and it will work
Im using ubuntu 10.04. I installed drapes and added the line “Type=application ” in drapes.desktop but even then it does not start after boot-up! can anyone help with this????
Maddy, did you spell it “application” or “Application”? This being Linux, I’d bet case is important.