change desktop background

Question

how can i change desktop background with python

i want to do it in both windows and linux

thanks

Answer 1

On windows, you will need some trickery with pywin32, and the windows API, on 'linux' the answer will depend on which desktop is running - KDE, Gnome, or something more exotic. Under KDE (and maybe Gnome) you can probably send a message using D-Bus, which you could do without including any new libraries by using the command line tool dbus-send.

The other option would be to set the desktop wallpaper to a file which you then edit / replace from python - but this will probably only result in a change when the user logs in.

Answer 2

On Windows with python2.5 or higher, use ctypes to load user32.dll and call SystemParametersInfo() with SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER action.

For example:

>>> import ctypes
>>> SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER = 20 
>>> ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoA(SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER, 0, "image.jpg" , 0)

Answer 3

On a gnome desktop, you usually do this with gconf, either directly calling gconftool or using the gconf python module. The latter is in the link given by unutbu. The first method could be done like this.

import commands
command = "gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename --type string '/path/to/file.jpg'"
status, output = commands.getstatusoutput(command)  # status=0 if success

Answer 4

In gnome, it is probably preferable to use the python binding of gconf directly:

import gconf
conf = gconf.client_get_default()
conf.set_string('/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename','/path/to/filename.jpg')