On Wednesday 15 December 2004 22:02, Randall R Schulz wrote:
ImageMagick -- http://www.imagemagick.org/. It's exactly what you say: A command-line-driven image manipulation program. It's available on the SuSE installation media, at least it is in SuSE Pro 9.1.
Randall Schulz
So, I achieved what I was trying to do. This was the task: 1. Get a picture from a known url 2. Set the desktop background to this picture. 3. Repeat this every xx minutes. Problems: 1. How to schedule the new retrieval 2. How to force KDE to refresh the background with the new picture. With the great help of Randall Schulz, here is what happened: I created a bash script like this: #!/bin/bash ###get the params #the filename of the dest. picture. It is provided by KDE (%f) FILENAME="$1" #the width of the screen - provided by KDE (%x) WIDTH="$2" #the HEIGHT of the screen - provided by KDE (%y) HEIGHT="$3" ### set the temp image filename for the background BACK=/tmp/desktop_back.jpg ### retreive and store in the file provided wget --proxy=off http://www.someurl.com/random/ \ -O "$FILENAME" ### theseprograms convert and composite are part ### of ImageMagik ### create the background with the given size convert -size "$WIDTH"x"$HEIGHT" xc:#1493EE "$BACK" ### put our picture in the middle and save in the same file composite -gravity center "$FILENAME" "$BACK" "$FILENAME" ### end of file Now, I right-clicked on the desktop and selected Configure desktop. On the background tab I selected "No picture". In the advanced settings, I selected "Use external program ..." Clicked ADD. And entered this info in the command and preview fields: /path/to/myscript %f %x %y And in the "executable" filed, only /path/to/myscript without the params. OK, OK, OK and I was set. Now, why I used ImageMagic - because there is no way to instruct KDE when using an external program for the desktop, to use some other display method that Tile. And when your picture is smaller it is tiled all over the place :) Of course this script is far away from perfect, as there are no error checks, etc. It even does not check if the downloaded image is bigger from the screen resolution. It may check this, and resize if needed. Cheers Sunny -- Get Firefox http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=10745&t=85