How to Make Gnome Desktop Automatically Change the Wallpaper?

Despite all the criticisms against it, still the one of the oldest parts of the GNU, the GTK+ written (now uses the GTK3+ toolkit with the Gnome 3) Gnome is one of the most popular choices among the GNU/Linux users when it comes to the desktop.

The GUI is extremely simplified thus it's pretty easy to learn to use it (especially if you're coming from the Mac OSX environment :D) but as mentioned, most of the time we'll have to depend on "external" applications when it comes to "computing" or doing certain things, since Gnome does lack some features. 

Anyhow, I don't know if we can call this feature a "must have" but nonetheless, if you want to make Gnome automatically change its wallpaper, well, by default you can't.

Although it has a simple desktop customisation window which lets you do things like change the wallpaper, add pictures from online sources (Gnome artwork, etc), change font, etc but it won't let you automatically change the wallpaper on a timely basis.

In that case, especially if you use Ubuntu Linux (the app maybe available for other major distributions) then there is an excellent utility called Cortina that does exactly that!.

Main features...

*. Once installed it'll run from the notification area and let you add wallpaper locations from local storage devices such as HDD/USB, etc easily.

*. Change the wallpaper from a timely basis automatically, finally! :D.

*. Lets you choose it to run when the desktop is loading.

*. Delete pictures from the "collection".

One thing though, once done configuring, don't click on the "close" button at the title-bar, use the big "Close" button below instead, otherwise it'll exit from running thus no more automatic wallpaper changing, etc...

*. Set pictures to - Zoom/scale/centre/spanned, etc

*. Change the time-frame.

That's about it. It's an amazingly simple yet extremely useful app if you want to automatically change those wallpapers nonetheless.

You can install Cortina in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 or 10.04 by using its PPA. To do that, open your GNU/Linux terminal and enter the below command.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:cs-sniffer/cortina

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cortina

That's it. Once installed you can access it via: "Applications" -> "Graphics" -> "Cortina" in classic Gnome desktop. Enjoy it!.