Linux wallpaper changer

First of all let me say I’m not a fan of wallpapers I’m more a “black background guy”.

But I have been hearing a friend complain about needing a program with this simple spec.

“take in a dir, randomly look for a wallpaper there and set it.”

I’m impress that gnome doesn’t has this so simple functionality same with fluxbox (although you can use feh, but I have yet to learn how). On the other hand KDE seems to have one that’s very nice it even has wallpapers on each desktop but it’s KDE.
Then they are lots of programs with a huge ammount of “functionality” like gradients and solid backgrounds and a bunch of stuff and yet they forgot something so simple as a random chooser.

Anyway I was about to fire up my editor and code something but i decided to google around and I found many:

all the relevant ones are in this thread, ironically they are all implementations of the same program in different languages.

The one that is a bit more complex is the C code which implements it’s own counter, the shell one, perl and python are just something that reads all files in dir and randomly gets one after that they all call gconftool-2 with the correct options to set the wallpaper; after that they all say set a cron job.

The one written in C goes hardcode loading a gconf instance and setting the property there ( /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename if someone is interested.) after that it created a mainloop and sleeps for X seconds, oh did I forget it needs to be compile and depends on 2 external libraries? good luck ubuntu users getting that build.
Anyway I could say which one I think it’s the best but as I said I don’t have any wallpapers to try them….

If only a friend of mine will lend me his huge list of wallpapers, which I’ll love to have but he refuses until I stop caling it “your huge pile of crap”
side note, check out this “true story” about openbox wallpapers why executable code is not a good idea

Come on click it it’s just one paragraph.