Change background in Gnome3/gnome-settings-daemon without using gnome-tweak tool or any GUI

Changing background in Gnome3 can be done in various ways the most common ones being the GUI ways. If you however want to change your Gnome3 background without any graphical user interface you can execute the following command inside the terminal client: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri “file:////etc/skel/drift.png

In the above example the /etc/skel/drift.png is the location of my background so tweak it according to your needs. If you are not using Gnome3 but you are using a windowmanager such as Fluxbox with gnome-settings-daemon then you can add the following line to your startup file:

(sleep 5 && gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri “file:////etc/skel/drift.png”) &

The above line tells your not-Gnome3 windowmanager to wait for 5 seconds and then get the background picture from the given file and apply it while using gnome-settings-daemon. The result of this approach is that your background will not get overwriten by Gnome3 settings but you can use your own custom background easily instead. You might need to tweak the examples given here according to your Linux configuration.

Introducing Slim display manager

What is Slim? It is a simple but yet very customizable display manager which does not have many dependencies. So in other words if you get it as your dm you will not need to worry about all those huge dependency lists coming your way. One other bonus of Slim is that it does not have remote login features which can add some security to your workstation. Continue reading →

Autostarting applications with .xinitrc

There is certainly a number of ways to autostart applications. As it happens every window manager has its own way of doing autostarting and at some point you might get a bit confused about where exactly you should put your autostart entries. To overcome the problems of autostarting you can use a file called .xinitrc . Continue reading →

Golden Windowmaker theme release and few tips

Since it is Sunday it is a perfect time to release another WindowMaker theme called Golden. The theme has a wallpaper and the traditional theme parts which are needed in order to run it in WindowMaker. This is also GPL like the Darkburn theme. (http://www.techtimejourney.net/?p=520). If you do need any instructions on how to install this theme you will also find them well documented on my previous blog post about the Darkburn. Continue reading →