I have a script that updates my desktop background every day with the NASA APOD. Since upgrading to 11.10, that script stopped working, presumably because I'm using gconftool-2 to actually update the desktop background. Is there a new way to do this under Unity?
Gnome Shell (Gnome 3) uses GSettings now instead of GConf. So in Gnome Shell you can use the command-line tool gsettings for that. Like gconftool, it lets you get or set an individual key.
You can get the current URI of the background image as follows:
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri
'file:///home/serrano/Pictures/x.jpg'
And set the background URI as follows (which will immediately update your desktop background):
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///home/serrano/Pictures/y.jpg
Notice that you must prepend the URI with "file://" for this to work (unlike with gconftool).
Ubuntu 22.04 and later
Since Ubuntu 22.04 the behavior has changed a little, depending on your color scheme preference:
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme
If your color-scheme is "prefer-dark" use picture-uri-dark instead:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark file:///home/serrano/Pictures/y.jpg
Otherwise use picture-uri like before:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///home/serrano/Pictures/y.jpg
