BING comes up with a beautiful background everyday. I thought why not set this background as my desktop wallpaper. But it would be a cumbersome task to set it manually. So I searched (Googled, BINGed) for some script which will do this for me. I found BING Downloader which does this task on Windows. I could not find any such script for GNOME. So, I thought of writing one.

I wrote a script which when executed automatically sets the GNOME wallpaper as BING background of the day. This is a PHP script. To execute this script you need to have php installed on your system. You can install php in Ubuntu as

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-cli

Now you are all set to download this script. Download Link: http://www.spsneo.com/scripts/bing_wallpaper.tar.gz

Download this file, extract the script file. Now you can run the script from terminal :
php bing_wallpaper.php

And your wallpaper is set. You can run this script daily from your terminal or you can set a cron job for the same or you can set up an icon in your gnome panel for this script.

I will keep updating this script. And I am also planning to write the same script in python. So check back again if you dont want to install php on your system.

Send your feedbacks and suggestions.

Update 1: I have modified the script to work with http proxy. Just assure that the environment variable http_proxy is properly set.

Update 2: Modified the script to keep the image centered on the desktop with black background. Try it out.

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4 Comments to “Set BING Background as your Desktop Wallpaper in GNOME”

  1. nitin | July 18th, 2009 at 2:11 am

    cool man!! I liked it but never thought of porting it to the desktop..

  2. Mugunth | July 18th, 2009 at 3:34 am

    Wow..! I never thought in PHP it would be just 5 lines!!! Thanks for visiting my blog and thanks for the port…

  3. Ramnath | August 10th, 2009 at 1:32 am

    Nice job. Likd it.

  4. YSLim | August 21st, 2009 at 12:12 pm

    Great job! I didn’t thought of using PHP’s wget to retrieve the wallpaper and set it through system function…

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