Is there any command line to change wallpaper in KDE4?
i.e. in Gnome: gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename <path_to_image>

If not, would be nice to have one, so that one could write a script that would control the wallpaper (such as xplanet)

At this time, it is not possible to set the wallpaper via the command line, unless you wish to manually wrangle the text of the plasma-desktoprc file, without Plasma running.

This is because Plasma completely rewrites its configuration file when shutting down, and when changes are made through its interface.

This could change when Plasma will get an overhaul in its DBus interface, IIRC. And going from memory I think that such a thing will be discussed at the upcoming Plasma development sprint (Tokamak III).

einar wrote:This could change when Plasma will get an overhaul in its DBus interface, IIRC. And going from memory I think that such a thing will be discussed at the upcoming Plasma development sprint (Tokamak III).

Would you be willing to speculate as to how long this might take?

Thanks.

Mark

Unfortunately a plan for implementing a DBUS interface to Plasma does not exist at this time. You may be able to use the Javascript console to perform something however.

That's a pity that KDE does not provide any programmatic interface to the desktop background.

My goal was to write a script that would download random wallpapers from various websites and display them as background pics. I could achieve it with the following workaround: save the downloaded picture to a folder (i.e. ~/.wallpaper/picture.jpg) and then tell plasma to show pictures in that folder in a slideshow. Since there is only one picture it works.

This would perhaps better be done through a Plasma wallpaper plugin.

Although the idea of a complete d-bus interface for Plasma is abandoned due to Aaron's work on JavaScript console (decision made at Tokamak 3) a few functions could be added to it.

The wallpaper one is requested often, so ... maybe.