For some time, GNOME has been able to use a series of images that change at specified intervals as the desktop background—with Ubuntu, Fedora, and, no doubt, other Linux distributions providing the Cosmos set as a demonstration—but it hasn’t included a simple way of defining those sequences. The format used is straightforward enough for anyone used to XML, but the files are time consuming to write or edit manually, and all users really ought to be able to create background slideshows with the same ease as setting static images as the wallpaper.

Various applications do already exist to change the wallpaper to a randomly chosen image after a set interval, or loop through the images in a particular folder in alphabetical order, but some work essentially as a separate daemon instead of using the built-in functionality, and I’ve yet to find any one at all that offers the flexibility of specifying the exact order and individual intervals between images. Seeing that it was not a particularly complex problem, I set out to make a programmatic solution. I’m not experienced enough to patch GNOME directly, but a little Python/GTK app that works with GNOME is no problem, and so I present CreBS.

More info can be found at the main CreBS page, but if you just want to download it, use this link:

Download CreBS

The initial release is 0.9. It works, but I’d like to add a few refinements before I call it finished.