Changing Back to the Original Schedule and First Video Post (Updated)
Posted on August 24, 2010 by robbychen
Update (12/08/2010): For some of you having trouble to run the PHP script, I posted a tutorial on how to install web server with PHP to help you who are non web developers to run the PHP scripts I wrote. Take a look here and leave a comment if you have any questions.
Update (08/25/2010): The video quality has been improved thanks to OpenShot. Note that to watch the original HD quality, you must switch to 720p or 1080p. I also fixed the PHP script to exclude the XML file inside the background.xml file so that the slideshow can run smoothly without an empty image.
After weeks of consideration, I finally decided to change back to my original post schedule of one post per day. Two posts each day simply doesn’t work for me.
I also plan to make a video version of the post along with each post. Here is my first video showing how to create a wallpaper slideshow in Ubuntu, one of the popular posts I wrote back to March of this year:
The steps in the video are different from the post. I recorded this video this afternoon. Just before that, I wrote a PHP script that can generate background.xml file for me. Â You can download the PHP script here:
http://blog2.robbychen.com/Ubuntu/slideshow.tar.gz
To use this script, you must first change the permission of the folder where the images are to 777. You may change it back to original permission after that for security reason.
If you have any problem running this script, please leave a comment below.
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Thank you for the excellent tutorial. Especially thanks for the php script. That saved me so much time.
You are welcome.
I’m in ubuntu 10.10 and I have installed apach2 and mysql-server but when I open the php file with firefox or chrome the window of download appear.
Please tell me what should I do.
In order to use my script to generate the slideshow XML file, you do not need the mysql-server. However, you need apache2 and php. To run php files on apache2, you need to install “libapache2-mod-php5″ package and place the script to /var/www folder. Also note that you need to use sudo to copy the files to the root file system. To better view the content of root folder inside the browser, you can rename or delete index.html. To view the script inside the browser, you need to navigate to http://localhost/.
would it be possible to have random images instead? Currently in the folder i have 01.jpg 02.jpg etc, but would like a continuous loop of random images
I think the random images with each loop is not possible with xml. It also cannot be done even with PHP array_rand function since it only generates random images in the first and only loop.
If you really want the random wallpapers, my suggestion is to use one of the external tools such as the tools introduced on this page:
http://www.linuxaria.com/recensioni/cambiare-lo-sfondo-su-linux?lang=en
However, these tools need to be running in the background in order to change the desktop wallpaper at the specific interval.
Hi,
I tried running the script, but I can’t get the php to display as a page. No matter what I do, it just downloads the file. I’ve even setup a webserver on one of my machines, but can’t get it to display.
Hi Cfreeman,
Did you just install apache2? If so, you also need to install php in order to get php script to work. In my experience, type the following command in Ubuntu installs all of the necessary packages to run the php scripts:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin
If you are on Windows, I recommend download XAMPP at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Please reply to this comment if you have any questions.
[...] UPDATE (09/01/2010): I wrote a PHP script that will help you generate background.xml file easier. I also made a video tutorial on how to use the script. You can find it along with the video in this post. [...]