Hello KDE community
I personally like both GNOME and KDE but I am working under GNOME, in general.

I am one of the developers of Wallch (http://wall-changer.sourceforge.net/)

Wallch is currently working only under GNOME 2 and 3, and we are planning on making it work under multiple different Desktop Environments, including KDE.

For this purpose, we have created a dialog, in which the user selects a DE, and a corresponding command appears, which will be used in the chosen by the user DE.
We have successfully found such commands for GNOME 3, GNOME 2, Fluxbox, XFCE, LXDE and others, but (surprisingly), not for KDE.

Could you please inform us, whether such a command exists or not in KDE?
For example, in fluxbox, the command goes as

Code: Select all

fbsetbg -f $image


After a search we found out that there was such a command in KDE 3 but not in KDE 4.

Please, clear it out a little bit for us, so us to make Wallch available for KDE too.

Thanks

It's not possible as far as I know: the relevant bits are not exported, for example, to D-Bus. What would be possible is to write a wallpaper plugin with some of the desired functionality, I think.

Thanks for the response, but that's a shame

I guess we will not alter the code by adding a whole check that will slow down Wallch (:P) in every system, only so as to work in KDE (plus making the application bigger ).

Thanks anyway!

Just looked at the code and it is quite big (almost 7000 files, I had to look through the plasma-desktop's code, the Desktop Settings program doesn't appear to be a separate one), so I was quite unable to find something useful, rather that some saveConfig() functions that use variables defined in other files and such.

Can a developer inform me which changes have to be made in which files and what dbus messages have to be send in order for the desktop to change?

Many users are using KDE and we want Wallch available for them, too

Also note a positive thing: Wallch uses Qt libraries as well! It shouldn't be so difficult to make it work...
If the things that have to be done in order to change the wallpaper can be done through bash, then a script file could come along Wallch and the problem will be solved (provided that KDE users are probably going to be a minority of the users).

Thanks for any additional information!

Relevant code is at kde-workspace/plasma/generic/wallpapers/image

Though I think you _may_ have some resistance implementing this.

The idea behind plasma wallpaper is that if someone wants to implement a live earth wallpaper (for example) they write a wallpaper pluign that draws live earth wallpapers.

If wallch is implemented as a library and application the "best" solution would be to write a wallpaper plugin that runs libwallch. Though obviously that's a lot more work.

Alternately, wallch could offer to provide patches to Plasma to allow a D-Bus command to change the wallpaper in use - providing the name of the desired wallpaper plugin (image in this case) and some settings for it (the url to the desired image in this case).