Ubuntu – How to change desktop background from command line in Unity

backgroundcommand linecustomizationunity

I have a script that updates my desktop background every day with the NASA APOD. Since upgrading to 11.10, that script stopped working, presumably because I'm using gconftool-2 to actually update the desktop background. Is there a new way to do this under Unity?

Best Answer

Both Unity and Gnome Shell (Gnome 3) use GSettings now instead of GConf. So in Unity and Gnome Shell you can use the command-line tool gsettings for that. Like gconftool, it lets you get or set an individual key.

You can get the current URI of the background image as follows:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri
'file:///home/serrano/Pictures/x.jpg'

And set the background URI as follows (which will immediately update your desktop background):

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///home/serrano/Pictures/y.jpg

Notice that you must prepend the URI with "file://" for this to work (unlike with gconftool).

In order to make your script work with both Gnome 2 and Shell/Unity, you can let it do a Gnome version check first:

gnome-session --version

That will return the version of Gnome. If the version number starts with 3, then gsettings can be used. If it returns a version starting with 2, let your script use gconftool instead.

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