Home Command line utilities Set “NASA Picture of the Day” as Wallpaper In Ubuntu

Set “NASA Picture of the Day” as Wallpaper In Ubuntu

By sk
Published: Last Updated on 1.9K views

Update: This app is discontinued and no longer works. Please find other alternatives.

There are plenty of tools out there to change the desktop backgrounds of Linux desktop periodically. While hunting to new desktop wallpaper changer utilities, I found a tool named "BG-Changer". It is a simple shell script that can be used to set NASA Picture of the day as wallpaper in Ubuntu and its derivatives. I have tested this script in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS desktop. It worked fine as I expected. Would you like to set NASA image of the day as your Ubuntu desktop's wallpaper? Great! Read on.

Set "NASA Picture of the Day" as Wallpaper In Ubuntu

The developer has made a PPA to ease the installation of this script in Ubuntu and its derivatives such as Linux Mint, Elementary OS etc.

Add BG-Changer PPA using command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:aljimohamed/ppa

Update the repository lists:

$ sudo apt-get update

Finally, run the following command to install BG-Changer in Ubuntu.

$ sudo apt install bg-changer

Once you installed BG-Changer, open your Terminal and run the following command:

$ sudo bg-changer

Wait for few seconds. BG-Changer will scan the NASA website and set "NASA image of the day" as wallpaper in your Ubuntu desktop.

Here is my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS desktop wallpaper:

Set "NASA Picture of the Day" as Wallpaper In Ubuntu

Beautiful, isn't it? You can verify the NASA image of the day from this link - NASA Image of the Day.

NASA image of the day

If you want a daily update, create cron job file as shown below:

touch /etc/cron.d/cron-bg-changer

And run this command to run BG-Changer automatically everyday:

echo "02 18 * * * root bash /usr/bin/bg-changer" > /etc/cron.d/cron-bg-changer

Now, your Ubuntu desktop wallpaper will be automatically updated everyday.

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3 comments

Moyo Freeman February 23, 2018 - 12:48 pm

seems not to be working in ubuntu 17.10
Cannot add PPA: ‘ppa:~aljimohamed/ubuntu/ppa’.
ERROR: ‘~aljimohamed’ user or team does not exist.

Reply
Mike Schoon July 17, 2018 - 7:46 pm

Same results in 18.04. Has the PPA changed? This is a very cool little app.

Reply
Bill Cumming October 11, 2018 - 8:56 pm

You can grab a copy of the script from Github

https://github.com/Sim4n6/bg-changer

Just copy the script from bg-changer/bg-changer-0.3.8/ in to /usr/local/bin/

Reply

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