Two small scripts to have a more interactive wallpaper:

• update.py - Update the wallpaper based on the time of day and the scene
• randomize.py - Randomize the scene based on available scenes

Beautiful scenic and minimalistic wallpapers from Pixel True here.

Scenes are saved in ~/Wallpapers. They require the following directory struture:

SCENE_NAME
    SCENE_NAME-day
        SCENE_NAME-day.png
    SCENE_NAME-night
        SCENE_NAME-night.png
    SCENE_NAME-sunset
        SCENE_NAME-sunset.png

This which follows the structure of (some) of the wallpapers downloaded from Pixel True.

The ~/Wallpapers directory also contains:

• .api_key - the API key for ipgeolocation.io, the service used for sunrise and sunset times
• .scene - the current scene

To run the scripts automatically, one can set up a simple systemd service and timer in userland. This blog post is what I followed to get this to work. For example, for the update script:

sunwell-update.service

[Unit]
Description=Randomize wallpaper

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/python /home/niki/Projects/sunwall/randomize.py
Environment=DISPLAY=:0.0

sunwell-update.timer

[Unit]
Description=Wallpaper randomize timer

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 0:00:00
OnBootSec=10s

[Install]
WantedBy=X.target

X.target

[Unit]
Description=Xorg server start

Put all three files in services in ~/.config/systemd/user/ (create it if you need to).

X.target is an empty unit which represents the start of the X11 server. We need to start it manually by adding the following:

~/.xinitrc

systemctl --user start X.target

Then, we can enable the timer so that it starts every time the X target is started:

systemctl --user enable sunwall-update.timer

And with that we're done! If you want to check whether things are going to plan, you can check systemctl --user or journalctl --user -u sunwall-update. If you want to manually change the wallpaper, just run systemctl --user start sunwall-update.service.