December 2002 – Page 16 – Something Odd!

I have a huge and growing collection of photos thanks to my interest in photography and my Fujifilm 2800z so earlier today I decided to display them in the background of my desktop..
Changing the background in X used to be simple. Just run wmsetbg with the filename of the image and it worked. Not so in Red Hat 8/Gnome 2.
I first searched on freshmeat and found chbg which is supposed to be.. well, I’m not sure. It’s damn confusing and I could only get it to display images in a window. (I suspect this has something to do with Gnome 2 and/or Nautilaus)
I then stumbled across chbg-gnome2 which is a very simple Perl script that uses the Gnome 2 gconf database to set the background. I copied (or symlinked) a few images into a directory, added a crontab entry for chbg-gnome2 pointing at that directory and now my background changes every 2 minutes! It’s The Unix Way of doing things I suppose.

Pat Kenny my friends, is a use …

Pat Kenny my friends, is a useless bastard. I have to admit the Late Late Show hasn’t interested me in a long time, and.. hmm, I was going to defend Pat by mentioning the excellent interview with some open source hacker guy last week but then I remembered all the simple technical blunders Pat made.. hehe