Wallch not changing wallpaper after upgrade to 14.04

Question

Wallch was working fine for me (not counting this - Wallch changing frequency resets automatically) on 13.10.

After 14.04 upgrade, I have the new indicator on top, but no option to either select the wallpapers/folders to select random wallpapers from, nor does it automatically change after the set interval like it used to.

Anyone else in the same soup, and with a solution?

Solution 1

Sorry for the inconvinience Charlie, I am one of the developers of Wallch and I have to say that it isn't Wallch to blame about this misbehavior.

Wallch is built using the Qt framework and weird bugs appear on 14.04 on all the Qt based applications.

For example, I have noticed a bug in VLC: When I change the system volume, VLC's volume changes as well, Clementine's indicator appears and disappears all the time, and now Wallch seems to have problems as well like clicking the "Start" at Wallpapers tab not working and sometimes crashing the app, being able to open multiple instances from Unity, resizing of window seems to have problems as well, menubar sometimes not appearing, shortcuts like Ctrl+Q not working.

I had no problems with the Qt applications until I installed the NVidia drivers myself. Then all Qt based applications started to misbehave. Qt Creator (official IDE for developing Qt applications) crashed during startup with an X server specific error message.

This is truly frustrating for the developers. It is really sad to spend so many hours bug testing your application only to find out that the integration itself is broken and there is nothing you can do about it. Actually you can, but it is very frustrating to see so many things changing from the one to the other version of Ubuntu that require your code to change as well.

We had tested Wallch a lot of times, and we never had these kind of bugs.

I am on the process of fixing these bugs myself right now.

Please for more information see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wallch/+bug/1310776

Solution 2

To bring this issue back, I've been having issues with Wallch myself, and I seem to have found some small workaround to it. It involves using a terminal (which you'll have to dedicate to the program, but you can easily hide this away somewhere.) This solution applies to the changing of wallpapers from the normal wallpaper screen.

First, open up the graphical interface and set the time interval you wish to have the pictures changed on. I say to do this from the graphical interface because I can't find a command line option that will set it for you, though I may just not have combed the documentation enough/missed something obvious. Besides that, the time seems to be saved even after closing out the graphical application.

After setting your preferred interval, open up the command prompt and run wallch with the following command:

wallch --change=[directory for pics] --start

This worked and got the wallpapers changing at the interval I wanted in the directory I wanted without crashing the application. However, there were one or two times where it crashed/didn't work, regardless. To fix this, I ran:

sudo apt-get purge wallch

sudo apt-get install wallch

Then I ran the above mentioned piece of code and things ran like a charm.

Hope this helps!

Solution 3

I use variety. http://peterlevi.com/variety/ It is not the best solution but I really like this program, this is why I am promoting it. :)

Comments

[charlie]

Initial view on Variety is that its nice.. Just wanna see if I can get Wallch to be fixed before i start looking for alternatives. Thanks!

[Serfius]

Ok Charlie, I hope you will find the solution! Just the last promoting: The best feature I like in the Variety is that it reads my wallbase.cc profile folder (among all folder that I have) and automatically download the wallpapers I selected. And it is pretty easy to install (and it is working like a charm in ubuntu 14.04) Sorry for the wall text. :)

[charlie]

Aww... I totally understand... was just checking if someone had a fix already. Applaud the work you guys did at wallch... its really cool. Hoping to see a fix soon (wherever the integration broke down), but for now.. am an IT professional, and would be glad to help out in any way possible. Jus let me know. :)