[HowTo] have Live wallpaper on Manjaro Gnome

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Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆

This guide will show you how to have a Live Wallpaper on Manjaro Linux. ¹

Installation instructions:

  1. Install mpv from the official repositories by executing:

    pamac install mpv

  2. Install xwinwrap-git after activating the AUR by executing:

    pamac install xwinwrap-git

Setup

  1. To set up a script that makes a Live Wallpaper possible:

    cd /usr/local/bin
sudo nano Live.sh

  2. Insert this command, while modifying the path to the video file you want to use:

    xwinwrap -fs -fdt -ni -b -nf -- mpv -wid WID --no-audio --loop "/path/to/your/videofile"

  3. Press Ctrl+X to exit and Y and Enter to save.

  4. make the script executable:

    sudo chmod +x Live.sh

Launch your new Live Wallpaper

  1. To launch the Live Wallpaper automatically you need a .desktop file in ~/.config/autostart:

    nano ~/.config/autostart/LiveWallpaper.desktop

  2. Copy-paste this and remember to modify its path in Exec;

    [Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=sh -c "path/to/Live.sh"
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Live wallpaper

  3. Again, press Ctrl+X to exit and Y and Enter to save.

  4. Log out and log in again and if everything goes according to plan you should see your Live Wallpaper now!

:slight_smile: :+1:

Note 1: It have only been tested on Gnome stable, but should work on any DE or WM. RAM consumptions is around ~100MB RAM.

5 Likes
2

Hi @Storm,

Thank you very much for this. Might give it a try myself at some stage as well.

Please, please, please, see Tutorial Content Creation Guide and edit your post accordingly. I would, but am unable to edit posts that aren’t my own.

1 Like
3

Okay :). I’m already editing :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
4

Thank you! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

5

I’m not sure how to use <kbd> command to illustrate keyboard buttons. I need to illustrate save and exit nano.

6

Command is not the right word. It’s actually markup, more specifically, HTML. That’s the tag for the <kbd> element. And using it is easy. See <kbd>this</kbd> will produce this

For example, if you wish to do Control + O: <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>O</kbd> produces Ctrl + O

I hope this clears it up. At lease somewhat.

2 Likes
8

Hey man, thanks for the idea and rundown.

I tried it using above scripts but the panel didn’t work properly on kde. After some searching, I found that there is a plugin to set video wallpapers from settings itself.

I’m using this wallpaper -

source: Aeolian Live Wallpaper | Live Wallpaper PC

1 Like
9

I have tried KDE’s live wallpaper plugin. It’s nice, but it eats your RAM big time last I tried it.

10

It depends on the video I guess. Loads the entirely of it into ram.

13 
The wid option must be an integer: WID
Error parsing option wid (option parameter could not be parsed)
Setting commandline option --wid=WID failed.
Exiting... (Fatal error)
mpv died, exit status 1

If you get this error above while running the xwinwrap command on the Setup part of the tutorial change the WID of the command to %WID.

(Try to run the original command on your terminal to reproduce the error, if it happens it won’t work on startup if you don’t change the WID to %WID)

so the final command will be like this:

xwinwrap -fs -fdt -ni -b -nf -- mpv -wid %WID --no-audio --loop "/path/to/your/videofile"
14

Thanks, does it consume a large amount of computer resources?