Set BING Background as your Desktop Wallpaper in GNOME


11 Replies

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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11 thoughts on “Set BING Background as your Desktop Wallpaper in GNOME”

  6. orjanv

    after uppacking the tar.gz, i would recommend to run this on the .php file:

    sed ‘s/centered/zoom/g’ -i bing_wallpaper.php

    in order to set the wallpaper fullscreen, since the images from bing.com is pretty small compared to the monitors used today. Even on netbooks.

  8. Karfield

    I think it’s no need to use php-cli. I write a bash script, it works fine too;)
    Here’s my code:

    #!/bin/bash
    #
    # Write by Karfield
    #
    # Free to use it!)
    #
    BING=http://www.bing.com
    TMPFILE=/tmp/bing.html
    WALLPAPER=/home/$USER/Downloads/bing.jpg
    echo “Try to get the BING page…”
    wget -q $BING -O $TMPFILE
    ! [ -e $TMPFILE ] && exit;
    URL=$BING$(sed -n “s/\(.*\)g_img={url\:’\([0-9a-Z?=%_-\\/\\.]*\)’\,id\(.*\)/\2/p” < $TMPFILE)
    echo "Get the picture's URL = "$URL
    rm $TMPFILE
    mv $WALLPAPER{,-old}
    echo "Download the wallpaper… "
    wget -q $URL -O $WALLPAPER
    if [ -e $WALLPAPER ]; then
    echo "We got it, set the background…"
    gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename $WALLPAPER
    gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options zoom
    gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color black
    fi

    You can save the code as update_bing_wallpaper.sh, don't forget to change the file mode as "u+x". And run it to change your background.

  9. Pingback: Set Bing images as your wallpaper « The Ubuntu Incident

  10. Viswanatha Reddy

    Hi Karfield,
    I tried to run your script, but it gave me the following error
    sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `?’
    This might be complaining about these lines
    ! [ -e $TMPFILE ] && exit;
    URL=$BING$(sed -n “s/\(.*\)g_img={url\:’\([0-9a-Z?=%_-\\/\\.]*\)’\,id\(.*\)/\2/p” < $TMPFILE)

    Then, I saw a bing.jpg file in Downloads. But it was corrupted.
    I'm using ubuntu 12.04. Can you please help me with that ?

  11. Lemontree123

    I have successfully run the script with following changes (will give at the end of post)! The image is downloaded good to the location mention in “/home/$USER/Downloads/bing.jpg”.
    NOTE: I need to run this script in Terminal mode!
    For the unknown character, you need to change the character ” to corresponding quote mark (the one next to my Enter button in keyboard) in the sed command.

    Here is my full script:
    BING=http://www.bing.com
    TMPFILE=/home/$USER/Downloads/tmp/bing.html
    WALLPAPER=/home/$USER/Pictures/bing.jpg
    echo “Try to get the BING page…”
    echo $TMPFILE
    wget -q $BING -O $TMPFILE
    ! [ -e $TMPFILE ] && exit;
    URL=$BING$(sed -n “s/\(.*\)g_img={url\:\([0-9a-Z?=%_-\\/\\.]*\)\,id\(.*\)/\2/p” < $TMPFILE | sed "s/[\']//g;" )
    echo "Get the picture's URL = "$URL
    rm $TMPFILE
    mv $WALLPAPER{,-old}
    echo "Download the wallpaper… "
    wget -q $URL -O $WALLPAPER
    if [ -e $WALLPAPER ]; then
    echo "We got it, set the background…"
    echo $WALLPAPER
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file://'$WALLPAPER
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options 'zoom'
    fi

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