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I am interested in having my desktop background automatically change every day. Perhaps taking the "picture of the day" from some website.

Is this something I could do with a Python script? I can code pretty well but I only really do numerical work, so I'm just looking for an overview of the process and then I can figure out the details.

I imagine it's fairly simple to have my script visit the website I'm interested in and to download the image. But then how do I engage with my (Linux) OS to tell it to set the image as background?

Thanks.

user1551817
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    what desktop environment/window manager? I think you just need to make script to change wallpaper from command line (e.g.: https://askubuntu.com/questions/66914/how-to-change-desktop-background-from-command-line-in-unity ), then add it to crontab – Kristian May 20 '21 at 11:38
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    see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34268791/how-to-change-the-desktop-wallpaper-on-linux-from-within-a-shell-bash-script or https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59653/change-desktop-wallpaper-from-terminal -- this is not really Python specific – fuenfundachtzig May 20 '21 at 11:46

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But then how do I engage with my (Linux) OS to tell it to set the image as background?

This might depend on what exactly system are using, but after quick search I found danilodellaquila.com article about doing that in Ubuntu. Check if any of two following commands do work after replacing path to some jpg image existing in your machine

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file:///path/to/wallpaper.jpg"

or

gconftool-2 --type=string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/to/wallpaper.jpg
Daweo
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