Timed Random Wallpapers in Fluxbox

I've always like both Openbox and Fluxbox, but neither of them come with an automatic wallpaper changer. The one that comes with KDE is great; in GNOME, I use the wallpaper-tray application, which can be installed with Synaptic. I missed having a feature like that whenever I switched over to Openbox or Fluxbox.

I wrote about how I got an automatic wallpaper changer going in Openbox in this earlier post. I figured I could use a similar approach for my Fluxbox installation in Mepis 8.

In Fluxbox, I use feh, and I can run the following command from a terminal to get a random wallpaper:

fbsetbg -r [path to directory containing backgrounds]

So I started out with a wallpaper-loop.sh script similar to the one I'd used in Openbox:

~/wallpaper-loop.sh

#!/bin/bash

while true
do
fbsetbg -r /home/steve/.fluxbox/backgrounds
sleep 360
done


Then I created ~/.fluxbox/autostart.sh:

~/.fluxbox/autostart.sh

#!/bin/bash

/home/steve/wallpaper-loop.sh


Next, I edited this line in the ~/.fluxbox/init file:

session.screen0.rootCommand: ~/.fluxbox/autostart.sh


For reasons I can't explain, this procedure worked to give me random wallpaper changes, but I was getting them at odd intervals -- every few minutes instead of every 6 minutes like I'd specified. That problem seemed to fix itself once I rebooted the computer.

So, it works fine here! Now I can enjoy random, automatic wallpaper changers in Openbox and Fluxbox like I do in KDE and GNOME!