Is there a command line option to change the background in the home page? That'd be great for making a script that periodically changes the background image.

Thanks

I am also interested in doing this. Perhaps settings up a directory of images and have them change the background randomly every X hours?

Since I'm not a hildon expert, I have only been able to figure out the brute-force method. The current background image is written to "/home/user/.osso/hildon-desktop/home-background.conf" in the entry "BackgroundImage". So one should be able to change that entry to a new value and then tell "something" to re-read the file and set the background appropriately.

However, I don't know what that "something" is. The stupid way is to run "ps" and grep for "hildon-desktop" and send it a SIGHUP. While that works, it makes the whole screen go crazy for a few seconds while the entire desktop is reloaded.

There is a program "/usr/bin/hildon-background-manager" but I think it's a service, possibly managed by DBUS calls. However, I know nothing of how that would work. Can any of the hildon programming pros out there offer some suggestions? Thanks!

Yeah, this is something I was thinking about looking into a few weeks ago. Run the script once a day to change the background. Especially useful now that we have correctly sized images from InterfaceLIFT.

I am very disappointed. I thought I had something when I found out that the background-manager is a DBUS service. But I just googled this archived email. Since it's dated Jan. 18, 2008, I guess there is currently no way to change the background image outside of the manual menu selection. Since Johan Bilien suggested "feel free to fill a feature request in bugzilla", perhaps I will have to figure out maemo's bugzilla. Ugh.

I was looking at this too. I was going to have a control panel plugin that let you set up folder and how often you want to change, and that would set up an alarm using alarmd that would send a dbus command to a helper application that would execute the switch. I thought this would be a better approach than g_timeout_add

I think it will still be possible, since the desktop-manager source is available. This would likely mean siphoning the relevant (LGPL) code and reusing it to set the background the same way. It might be too much work to do it this way (they really should have a dbus command to do this) but I will take a look at it.

I have submitted a bug report / enhancement request for this issue. Feel free to add to it.

Not really orthodox but a script called by init that copies a random image from a folder replacing the cached bkground image?

By "init", do you mean during the bootup sequence?

AFAICT, when you specify a new path/image in the "/home/user/.osso/hildon-desktop/home-background.conf" file and reboot, that new background image will be displayed. So you could write a script which changes your background image on every reboot. But I'd like to see the background change a little more frequently.

However, I might have misunderstood your comment...

Yes, I mean that

Yes, that is another solution but I was thinking of the actual image itself. I cannot remember where it is stored but a cached copy is made.

You can add the script to cron too ( a port exists for os2008)

Is the source code for the background manager not available? (http://timeless.justdave.net/mxr-tes...round-manager/)

Why not add an api to allow this sort of thing and submit it as a patch to the bug (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3030) so that it might be added in the next release?