jlu5
commented
4 years ago Hi,
There's a lot of text here and it's quite difficult to follow... There's a reason we have the issue template, please don't delete it when writing issues.
- What's your Variety version?
- Are there any errors in
~/.config/variety/variety.logthat might give clues as to why wallpaper changing doesn't work? - Double check what display manager you're actually running. Ubuntu 18.04 switched to GDM as the default display manager (i.e. the app that handles the login screen). You can check by running
apt policy lightdm gdm3to see which one's installed.- LightDM support requires copying the current wallpaper to a world-readable location
- Recent versions of Variety enable GDM background switching by default. In older versions, the code to do that is commented out in
~/.config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper. You can try enabling it manually there
- The preferences dialog not opening and wallpaper switching not working sound like they could be different issues. But again, hard to tell without any debug info.
Hi, I've just upgraded from Ubuntu 16 to 18 (maybe on the way to 20 soon enough if I can't get things fixed - let's see). I really needed to do it, because I was having a lot of trouble with the sound on this laptop, and those problems do seem (touch wood) to have been sorted out. But let's give it a few more days to see if that's true. I can't for the life of me understand why they took away the automatic possibility to have the horizontal-vertical workspace grid, which is absolutely one of my favourite things about using Linux (from way way back when I first used UNIX at university). So I installed the Unity desktop and got my grid back.
But unfortunately (getting to the point, sorry) I've lost another favourite feature - your Variety wallpaper changer. To be precise, I haven't exactly lost it. The icon is sitting there on the top bar, but I've got no wallpaper at all right now - just a black background. The program still appears still to be working. I can view the history of images that it's been using, and it still appears to be downloading new images from these online repositories (which is why I really like this app). But the preferences tab doesn't open when I click on it. I don't have any idea where to go from here.
When I restarted in 18 for the first time I had the current Variety wallpaper, but no sign of the tray icon. The wallpaper was still there after installing the Unity desktop, but still no icon. The icon did finally turn up after a couple of restarts, while doing some other attempted tweaks. I wanted to change the login screen to display the Variety wallpaper, and to get rid of that Ubuntu drum sound, which I don't particularly want to hear every single time I log in. The thing which appears to have knocked the wallpaper out was when I tried following instructions about changing the wallpaper. I think that it might have been this one,, but to be honest I don't exactly remember, as I was reading different threads at the same time, and getting myself confused. Now that I've read some of the small print on that thread, I can see that the Ubuntu guys precisely don't want people setting their own wallpaper on the login screen because of security issues. Fair enough, but I need to know how to get Variety working again. I went to the Appearance tab in settings, but that's not even changing to any of the preloaded Ubuntu wallpapers. So no idea.
One weird thing that happened was that while trying to find out what worked and what didn't, I was playing with the Variety image history, and for some reason (no idea how!!) I've got a picture of a grumpy-looking Napoleon after the Battle of Waterloo as my desktop background. But that was gone after restarting, and back to black :~(
Sorry, I'm not a professional coder (albeit that I would like to understand these things), so can't tell you any more than that.