How can I set an animated background?

Question

I want an animated desktop wallpaper on Ubuntu. For example, the animated Enlightenment background.

How does one achieve this?

Solution 1

Live Wallpaper

The Live Wallpaper app was featured on OMG! Ubuntu.

A number of live wallpapers come with the software, including:

• Circles

  

• Galaxy

  

• Nexus

  

• Noise

  

• Photoslide

  

(Obviously, these look really cool when they're actually moving.)

Additional live wallpapers can be added as plugins written in C.

Solution 2

I have seen 2 backgrounds that are animated and there is a package called xplanet for one of them inside USC. This website is where it comes from.

It is a picture of the earth and moon turning and looks absolutely amazing.

Unfortunately I cannot get this to work in 11.04.

There is also one with real time sunlight. A PPA to install it can be found here

Solution 3

You can use A-Desk, this is a script that allows you to use video files as a wallpaper. Here is a link to my article about installing a-desk 0.17 on Ubuntu 10.10.

Install a-desk 0.17 on Ubuntu 10.10

There is a new version of A-Desk (0.18) but installing it works the same.

The problem with A-Desk is that all the download links for it fail these days.

Solution 4

If you can live with a "sort of" animated background, the best solution is Ubuntu's "slideshow" feature, which is a bit buried in Settings and only editable via slighly non-GUI means. It allows you to change your wallpaper, also in short intervals, thus giving you an animated impression.

This feature is covered in these questions and discussed in these blogposts: Advanced Background Slideshows in Ubuntu and Animated desktop wallpaper on Ubuntu Linux, the latter comparing it with other options.

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Comments

[Jason Southwell]

Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.

[Knowledge Cube]

You should summarize the steps here and provide the link only for reference. This avoids problems with linkrot.

[Rinzwind]

The person that downvoted me: care to tell me why two year later you believe this still works? It is pre Unity...

[Cedric Reichenbach]

Unfortunately, the stable PPA seems not to work, but I just installed daily and that looks good. Also, make sure to install the package livewallpaper-config (settings application). Not sure why they didn't put all in one package...

[Aquarius Power]

does it support animated gifs? and... there is no desktop icons in front of it?

[Aquarius Power]

even after compiling, it still did not work as expected, it is opening the target application window (in my case eog with an animated gif) and it not actually using it as background/wallpaper, the target app window just shows up as a normal app window.

[oarfish]

This is the definitive answer. Works on 16.04 as well. Sad though that desktop icons are not shown, despite the fact that it says it should work on Nautilus.