Wallpaper

Half-naked bunnies embracing Tux might be nice on the Desktop, but a true OSmaper goes for a self made alternative: An up2date map of your home/mapping area as wallpaper-image.

This page will show you step-by-step how to set up an automatically updated background image, showing the OSM-Map of an area of your choice.

NOTE: The service that powered this is now offline. Another route will need to be found to make this work.

Linux (Debian,KDE)

1. Go to this page and enter the values of your choice to generate an image of the desired area. The image size should of course fit the resolution of your screen. Best quality is achieved by png-output
2. After clicking OK the image is generated. You should check if it meets your idea and, if so, copy the URL.
3. With an editor of your choice you have to create a shell-file somewhere in your home-directory. Name it wallpaper.sh for example.
4. Enter the following into the file

   wget -q -O /home/user/wallpaper.png "URL"

   Replace URL by the URL you've copied under 2. Make sure that the URL is in quotes ("http://xyz"). Replace /home/user/wallpaper.png by a location of your choice. When executed this script downloads the current image and saves it to the given location.
5. Create a cronjob to execute the script automatically:
   • Open your shell and type crontab -e
   • An editor appears to edit your private crontab
   • In a new line insert one of the following:
     • 0 12 * * * wallpaper.sh to update the image daily at noon.
     • 0 12 /2 * * wallpaper.sh to update the image every second day at noon.
     • 0 12 * * 1 wallpaper.sh to update the image every monday at noon.
   • Replace wallpaper.sh by the full path to your script, e.g. /home/myname/wallpaper.sh
   • When using KDE you can do this also by using kcron, a GUI-frontend
6. Right-click on your desktop to set the wallpaper-preferences to the location of wallpaper.png

This way the image is only updated when the computer is running at the time stated in the crontab. You can also trigger an update by copying the script in your autostart-directory e.g. /home/myname/.kde/Autostart. Then each time you log-on the image will be fetched.

Linux (Debian,GNOME)

1. Go to this page and enter the values of your choice to generate an image of the desired area. The image size should of course fit the resolution of your screen. Best quality is achieved by png-output
2. After clicking OK the image is generated. You should check if it meets your idea and, if so, copy the URL.
3. With an editor of your choice you have to create a shell-file somewhere in your home-directory. Name it wallpaper.sh for example.
4. Enter the following into the file

   wget -q -O /home/user/wallpaper.png "URL"

   Replace URL by the URL you've copied under 2. Make sure that the URL is in quotes ("http://xyz"). Replace /home/user/wallpaper.png by a location of your choice. When executed this script downloads the current image and saves it to the given location.
5. Create a cronjob to execute the script automatically:
   • Open your shell and type crontab -e
   • An editor appears to edit your private crontab
   • In a new line insert one of the following:
     • 0 12 * * * wallpaper.sh to update the image daily at noon.
     • 0 12 /2 * * wallpaper.sh to update the image every second day at noon.
     • 0 12 * * 1 wallpaper.sh to update the image every monday at noon.
   • Replace wallpaper.sh by the full path to your script, e.g. /home/myname/wallpaper.sh
6. Right-click on your desktop and go to "Change Desktop Background" and add a new background location of wallpaper.png