I've been using "display -window root ~/Graphics/nameofimage.bmp" (for example) to change the background image in the root window. Went to use it today and was told no such command. Did "man display" and told no man page for "display" either. Found an instance in the history list that had worked, entered it and got same result.

Did a search from the root directory, in Midnight Commander, for "display" and nothing showed up anywhere.

What happened? Is there a way to get this useful command back?

(a) you were hacked, and hacker left his mark by changing permissions of display
(b) you did rm /usr/bin/display instead of rm ~/temp_stuff (I hate when that happens)
(c) Someone finally learned not to do everything as root.
; )

Anyways, (sry about the droning on...), try 'whereis display' 'find -name display' etc.
If something shows up, check the permissions. If nothing, try to reinstall.

I take care never to log in as root, and generally what I do as root (because I have to) is just routine stuff and I'm careful when I do it, so I don't think I wiped display out that way.

I did slocate -u and then slocate display and result was nothing except unrelated items containing the word display.

I'd like to reinstall but don't know how. I searched the first two of the three Mandrake 9.1 distro CD's and didn't find the program there; which is not suprising if it's hidden in some one of the thousands of rpm's... Web searches and a search on this site have not helped me, either.

I found other ways to change the background image, but it's disturbing to have a program just seemingly vanish like that.

from what I can tell, 'display' looks like part of ImageMagick (at least in debian). Maybe you can see if you can reinstall that...

I'll bet you hit the proverbial nail on its metaphoric head, Cuckoopint. I UNINSTALLED Imagemagick a couple of days ago because I got sick of that goofy wizard character filling up my screen whenever I requested some image function that was unfulfillable.

OK, assuming this is the case, and I imagine it is (will check soon), I have to ask myself if it's worth putting up with a bad cartoon character's intrusive presence to have a useful feature returned to me. I might just continue to use chbg instead--more cumbersome, but accomplishes the same thing. I can also use wmsetbg--but it doesn't handle bmp images, of which I have a whole lot from my so-called life as a MS Windows user....

Thanks for the suggestion.

I myself use xsetbg, but don't know if that supports bmp...

BTW, I don't know what this 'character' is, since all my imagemagick options are started from the console...but I'm assuming its something to do with KDE and ImageMagick...? I'm thinking of some terrible MS paper clip deal...eeew. don't scare me like that.

My system doesn't have xsetbg...

And you don't want to know what that wizard looks like! (It's a "human" type wizard complete with pointy cap and magic wand, etc.)

The reason I use relatively "minimalist" window managers (currently icewm, which I love! but also am fond of blackbox) is that I cannot tolerate the cartoonish look of so many icons, etc. in both the KDE and Gnome desktop environments. Plus, they make my computer respond much slower. The speedy, clean-looking window managers are the thing for me! All the other decor I need is a nice background image of my own choosing. Then I'm relatively happy. :-)

same here... I wrongly assumed you were using kde/gnome b/c you had wizards popping up....

I use open/blackbox. Throw in some aterms and you have a done deal.