Gnome 3 Wallpaper Switcher

Every once in a while, I don't feel like looking at the same thing over and over again. Call it a geek version of wanderlust; but I like to have my desktop wallpaper change frequently. And I like it better when I don't have to choose, but a new background pops at random.

And with Gnome 2, the default window manager for a good number of Linux distributions, that wasn't hard to do. There were daemons (small background programs) that you could install, or you could create XML files that told GNOME's settings manage exactly which background you wanted for exactly how long.

Gnome 3 featured a major rewrite of the underlying controls. And while this created a great number of improvements -- visibly and performance-wise -- a few features were removed. As of 3.0.2, one of those was the ability to set those wallpaper slideshows as a background.

My google-fu is strong, though; and I soon found that it wasn't the ability to use the slideshow files that had been removed, it was the ability to select the file. The underlying mechanics were the same, as was the syntax of the XML file. It was simply a matter of "You can't get there from here." You could, however, get there from the command line; and that's where my python-fu came into play. Hopefully, Google Docs doesn't mess with my code too much here....