Perl Hacking my Gnome Backgrounds

[aphenine]

One of the other things I managed to do was to write a short Perl script that cycles my background under gnome to a random image from a folder, again something I thought beyond my ability. I find it ironic that I've used a lot of Perl to write simple system scripts, amongst them some installation and maintenance scripts for the Tsunami Beowulf

Comments

[pseudomonas]

invoke it in ~/.bash_profile, if you're using bash. otherwise your favourite shell will have a magic file equivalent.

[aphenine]

Hmm, I'd thought of that, but didn't know a few things, so I didn't try it.

What I'm not sure about is when ~/bash_profile is run. Is it like ~/bashrc which runs with every shell invocation? Does it only run once for each instance of bash under my user? Does it run multiple times if I log in on different vts?

[pseudomonas]

Um, not sure. It usually does what I want, I think. I know that's not terribly helpful. I like putting echo commands in these files so I can see what's starting when.

[aphenine]

Ok, thanks for trying anyway. I found out that I could do it via GDM.

(In case you're interested: I added it to /etc/gdm/PostLogin as the Default script and that works so far. I had to add a line asking the username and also a chown at the end.)

[pseudomonas]

Ah; I was assuming that the usual model was you wanted something to run when ssh-ing into a machine that you didn't necessarily have root access to.

[aphenine]

Oh, ok. I suppose I could have been accessing the desktop remotely, but then, don't you think sticking graphic (and therefore network) intensive backgrounds plus a visually heavy desktop environment would have hinted strongly that I wasn't?

[pplfichi]

.xinitrc (or if using a session manager .xsession) would be where I would put it. GDM should hopefully look at .xsession, so if you ever change session manager it should still work.

[aphenine]

Hmm, it would be a lot better if I could get the script run from my own home directory. Do you know off the top of your head how you'd go about embedding/invoking the script from either of them?

[pplfichi]

script.pl & (or however you call your script) at the end of .xsession? If the script isn't in your $PATH you'll need to provide it.

(This is the top of my head, it might not really work like this)