Personalising the desktop wallpaper in Ubuntu

By Hamish Taylor
Tuesday, 06 January 2009 05:53

Opinion and Analysis

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring how to set the desktop background (also known as "wallpaper") on the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Personalising a computer is important to many people, including me. Whilst software creators (including Microsoft, Apple, Canonical and all of the others) make up some great artwork for their desktops, sometimes it's just nice to have my own choice for a desktop wallpaper or background, such as a photo I have taken while on holidays.

In Windows it is pretty easy to do this. Find a photo or graphic that you like, right-click on it and select "Set as wallpaper". But how do you do this in Ubuntu?

There are three ways. The first is to right-click on a blank part of the desktop and select "Change Desktop Background". This gets you directly to the Wallpaper section. This is also accessible via the menus: System, Preferences, Appearance, Background. I will go into the third method a little later as it is initially slightly more complex, but I think it is more useful.

To add a new wallpaper image, click on Add and then navigate to the file that you want to set as the desktop wallpaper. This image then becomes the default desktop wallpaper. If you want to change to another wallpaper, just click on the alternative and watch for the orange border, which indicates the new selection.

Using the drop down Style menu, you can set if you want the image to be Tiled, Zoomed, Centred, Scaled or to fill the screen. Most of the time I use Zoom as that seems to give me the best results. Returning back to the desktop will show the newly selected image.

Alternatively, if you want to be able to do this directly from the file manager, just like in Windows, you'll need to install a tiny utility. Go to System, Administration, Synaptic Package Manager. Type in your password, as you are making a system change and this requires elevated rights. Click on Search and type in nautilus-wallpaper. When that appears, right-click it and select "Mark for Installation". There may be a few other required files, also known as "dependencies" which are required to make this work. Accept them by clicking Mark. Click on Apply.

Wait for it to download and install. At 65.5kb the utility itself really is tiny and this will only take a few seconds.

Once this is done, to be able to access the extra functionality you might have to restart the file manager Nautilus. You can do this a few ways: restart the computer, or log out and then back in again, or press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart the graphical user interface (which requires you to log back in), or using the Command Line Interface type in "killall nautilus", which restarts Nautilus.

Now when you are browsing your files and see a picture or photo that you want as your wallpaper, simply right click on it, and select "Set as Wallpaper". Personally, I think this is the easiest method. I hope this helps someone who might have been struggling to find out how to do this the "easy" way!

As always, please leave feedback, comments and questions. However, I will only respond to comments left on iTWire article discussion forums. The direct link for this article is here.