Ubuntu – How to change the desktop background in Cinnamon

backgroundcinnamonwallpaper

I've changed my desktop environment to Cinnamon on 32 bit 15.04, the problem is that I can't seem to change my desktop background by going to System Settings->Background as I have selected a new background (several different ones I've tried to make sure it isn't just a bug affecting just one wallpaper) but no changes have occurred. I have also tried restarting Cinnamon (by the panel applet) in case the changes only occur after it is restarted and I did see the wallpaper I picked out while Cinnamon was restarting but once the restart had completed and I opened nautilus it went back to the old wallpaper I had before.

I rebooted my PC after attempting MiHa's answer and my background was the one I had wanted and then two system error messages appeared, leaving me with this desktop:
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Notice how my desktop icons are doubled up. My unwanted background before I rebooted was:

enter image description here

and the one I wanted was:

This

Best Answer

I'm not sure why Nautilus changes the background. Nemo comes packaged with Cinnamon, but since you installed on top of Ubuntu, Nautilus is left as the default application. As such, some applications will call to Nautilus instead of Nemo, e.g. opening the Download directory from Chrome.

You can change your default file manager to Nemo by following: How to set nemo as default instead of nautilus?

Once you change your default file manager, you may have to change your desktop back to what you want and/or reset your computer.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Cron not able to succesfully change background

Apparently gsettings needs some variables to be set. Because CRON uses only a very restricted set of environment variables you must set them before your script. Use the following code in your CRON line.

30 */2 * * * DISPLAY=:0 GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf /your/path/your-script.sh

In the example the job is set to run every 2 hours on the 30th minute. I've tried to insert the variables into the script, for a cleaner line, with no result, if someone find a way to do that, let us know.

Stumbled with these settings in ArchLinux forums.

The above solution no longer works with Vivid.

The best way to get this to work is indeed to find DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable, in the following script I'm using a for loop to do the job because using pidof of a specific application like gnome-session doesn't always work for me and the newers applications have a different DBUS ADDRESS probably because, in my particular case, I'm starting some daemons on boot with my user name. To effectively change the wallpaper I'm using dconf but you can also use gsettings. So tweak the script to your use case.

#!/bin/bash -e
user=$(whoami)

fl=$(find /proc -maxdepth 2 -user $user -name environ -print -quit)
while [ -z $(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS "$fl" | cut -d= -f2- | tr -d '\000' ) ]
do
  fl=$(find /proc -maxdepth 2 -user $user -name environ -newer "$fl" -print -quit)
done

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$(grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS "$fl" | cut -d= -f2-)

if [ $# -gt 0 ]
then
  PICS_PATH=$1
else
  PICS_PATH="/home/public/Pictures/Wallpaper/"
fi

IMG=$(find -L $PICS_PATH -name "*.jpg" -o -name "*.png" | shuf -n1)
#gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "file://${IMG}"
dconf write "/org/gnome/desktop/background/picture-uri" "'file://${IMG}'"

echo -e "$(date): ${IMG}" >> /tmp/wallch.log

in crontab add the following line to change wallpaper every even hour

0 */2 * * * /path/to-above-script.sh /path/to-wallpapers/

Ubuntu – Ubuntu 13.04 unable to change background images in user mode

I had the same exact problem, and it's covered by this bug in Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/1115886

The solution that worked for me, was to open dconf-editor, and set the following to active:

org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background.active

That is, clicking "org" -> "gnome" -> "settings-daemon" -> "plugins" -> "background" and clicking the checkbox "active."

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Cron not able to succesfully change background

Ubuntu – Ubuntu 13.04 unable to change background images in user mode

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