GnomeSuit: Multi-monitor cycling wallpaper application.
 

Hello everyone!

Hope this is the right place for this...
I use Ubuntu, and, by extension, gnome. I also run a dual monitor system and have been generally dissatisfied with the near lack of support for multiple monitors, especially in simple desktop wallpaper handling. I've tried nitrogen and do not like how I need to "restore" it every time I log into a session and, as far as I'd been able to find, it had no support for "cycling wallpapers".

Soo...
I wrote my own tool and I wanted to share it with the community! See if anyone other than myself would find it useful.

The application is called GnomeSuit, and you can find it's GIT repository at gitorious. It's a small python application.

In sort, based on a series of configurations, GnomeSuit will generate a single large wallpaper image that will be spanned across all active monitors. This large wallpaper has other images pasted into it at specific locations to match the offsets and resolutions of each active monitor on the system.

GnomeSuit is a way of defining "Screens" (one per monitor) that hold image information for that single monitor. For each screen defined, you can set a single image, or a set of images that can be cycled through linearly or at random, or the screen can be pointed to a wallpaper directory where images will be chosen at random as wallpapers. How images are chosen is unique to each screen... meaning each screen can have its own theme, if desired.

GnomeSuit can also grab information from xrandr to set each screens position and offset from one another automatically.

All GnomeSuit settings are stored in the GConf at "/apps/gnomesuit" and the application should remain intact even if all of the settings in the gconf are garbage.

At the moment, GnomeSuit is still only a command line tool, but I have immediate plans to start developing a GUI interface as well.

Finally, other than Python (tested on 2.6.5) you will also need the python bindings for GConf as well as the Python Image Library (PIL).

I would love to hear feed back and suggestions anyone's willing to give.