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Use Live Wallpapers in Ubuntu

August 11, 2012
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For those that don’t know, a live wallpaper is an animated background for your desktop. These kind of wallpapers have been a regular feature on Android for quite a while now, but as of now, you can use live wallpapers in Ubuntu also!

The tool we use to accomplish this is Slidewall. Slidewall is a tool that has a couple of tricks up its sleeve – not only does it support live wallpapers but you can also set it to cycle through a selection of images automatically.

By default Slidewall comes with a selection of ‘wallpaper clocks’ and also a live wallpaper featuring an image of the earth that rotates in real time. Pretty impressive hey!

Here are a few screenshots to wet your appetite:

If the default wallpapers don’t do it for you, you can download more from here. To install Slidewall in Ubuntu, simply run the following commands in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fioan89/slidewall 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install slidewall

If you are using a different distribution than Ubuntu, you can find instructions on how to install Slidewall in other distro’s on the Slidewall launchpad page.

Use Live Wallpapers in Ubuntu
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  • http://www.linuxrants.com Linux Rants

    Looks like your “sudo” from the last line ended up on the end of line #2. Definitely checking this one out!

  • http://www.linuxrants.com Linux Rants

    Hm, after the installation, it runs, but doesn’t seem to do anything. Any special tricks that you can send my way on how this thing works?

    • https://refu-archive.kevquirk.com/ Kev Quirk

      No, I just picked a wallpaper, hit apply and it changed. When picking the automatically changing ones from a website (I forget the URL) it did say that it updated every 15 mins and that I may have to wait.

      Thanks for the heads up on the cmd. I’ll change that now :)

      • http://www.linuxrants.com Linux Rants

        Don’t know what the deal was the first time I tried it. I tried it again and everything worked. I like the slideshow too. Just feed it a wallpaper folder and let it run. Only problem I’ve had is that I’m using the acyl-icons set, and it looks pretty nasty against dark wallpaper. If you’re using an icon set that’s generic enough to work with light and dark wallpaper, this wouldn’t be a problem.

  • Yop Spanjers

    When it changes it goes to black first… Or is this just me?

    • https://refu-archive.kevquirk.com/ Kev Quirk

      I did get a short delay of around a second or two whilst it initially loaded, but after that it was fine.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000578634272 João Elvas

    I did it just as said and the error is allways the same

    b1sgas@Kronos:~$ sudo apt-get install slidewallReading package lists… DoneBuilding dependency tree Reading state information… DoneE: Unable to locate package slidewall

    • https://refu-archive.kevquirk.com/ Kev Quirk

      What version of Ubuntu are you running? Have you added the PPA and carried out an update? If so, do you get any errors during the error?

      It should work fine, the only thing I can think of is that you are using 12.10 and there isn’t a package on the repo for that yet (this is just a guess though).

      • Paul Dirac

        Sadly that’s true, I am also using Ubuntu 12.10 and can’t install Slidewall.

    • http://profiles.google.com/knucklessg1 Audel Rouhi

      I get the same thing :(