The KDE - Gnome Challenge: feh

The KDE - Gnome Challenge: feh

A bit delayed, but following with the thread you've probably decided that you would like to see something else besides the default wallpaper. In a traditional desktop environment, there is a program that has the responsibility of drawing the desktop, in KDE it's a very complex plasma, and in gnome it's a window provided by nautilus that runs on top of the desktop. Since we don't actually need much from a desktop per se, all we need to do is draw on the 'root window' which is the X Windows System way of saying 'desktop'.

To do so, we need to add a small command to your .xsession file. First install the program feh with yum install feh -y if it's not already installed. Feh is also a decent program for viewing images too, which is why i'm using it.

To have feh draw your desktop background, just add the following command to your .xsession file, before the line for xmonad (or which ever window manager you choose):

feh --bg-scale /path/to/wallpaper

It's really not more complicated than that.

Somethings you might want to explore, if you like that sort of thing is that there are a number of programs that can all draw to the root window. It's possible to use them to draw pictures, tile multiple pictures together, create a slideshow, or even draw video or goofy animations that follow the cursor. If you find something cool, be sure to leave a comment or blog it too.