We already wrote about a wallpaper application for Linux which displays the current weather, moon phases and time of day based on your current location, in real time. This time, I'm going to tell you about a script created by Claudio Novais @ Ubuntued which displays a picture of the Earth, in real time, like so:
The script needs a permanent internet connections and uses just ~400kb of memory so don't worry about it eating system resources. Also, please note the the script tries to update every hour but if it fails, it tries to get the image from 5 to 5 seconds, for 5 minutes and if it still fails, it tries again in an hour. That's especially useful for when running the script at system start-up, because it takes some time until the internet connection is set up, or for when the internet connection goes down, etc.
How to use the real-time Earth wallpaper script for Linux
1. Download the script from HERE.
2. Create a new folder in your home partition, let's call it 'earthwallpaper' and put the script you just downloaded into this folder.
3. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder you created at step 2 and make the script executable, and run it:
4. Running the script creates a new wallpaper called world.jpg in your ~/.gnome2 folder. We need to set this as your wallpaper. This picture is constantly updated by the script, thus making the image dynamic. To do this, open Nautilus, toggle the text-based address bar and type:
5. Obviously, this is not the way to do it permanently, so we need to make it run automatically. Go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and select 'Add', in the name field enter 'Earth Wallpaper' and in the command field, enter:
Changing /path/to with the path to were you copied the changer.sh file you downloaded at step 1.
Now, each time you start your computer, the script which updates your wallpaper will automatically run.
Enjoy.
2. Create a new folder in your home partition, let's call it 'earthwallpaper' and put the script you just downloaded into this folder.
3. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder you created at step 2 and make the script executable, and run it:
~/earthwallpaper
chmod +x changer.sh
sh changer.sh4. Running the script creates a new wallpaper called world.jpg in your ~/.gnome2 folder. We need to set this as your wallpaper. This picture is constantly updated by the script, thus making the image dynamic. To do this, open Nautilus, toggle the text-based address bar and type:
~/.gnome25. Obviously, this is not the way to do it permanently, so we need to make it run automatically. Go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and select 'Add', in the name field enter 'Earth Wallpaper' and in the command field, enter:
/path/to/changer.shChanging /path/to with the path to were you copied the changer.sh file you downloaded at step 1.
Now, each time you start your computer, the script which updates your wallpaper will automatically run.
Enjoy.
