There are many ways to find out the weather condition in your city. You can go to weather.com, use weather widget or even set it on your desktop with conky. Here is yet another way that you can obtain weather information quickly: display the weather condition as a wallpaper in your desktop. WeatherPaper is a weather based desktop wallpaper changer for Windows and Linux. It fetches the weather condition at a regular interval and display the information on your desktop as a wallpaper. It is functionality similar to the weather applet in conky (both grab the weather condition from weather.com and display the information in your desktop) except that this WeatherPaper script displays the information in the form of a wallpaper and it is customizable and visually more pleasing.
Installation
- Go to the WeatherPaper site and download the latest version of the weatherpaper script (the latest version as of this post is 0.2.2 and the file name is 0.2.2-linux.tar.gz)
- Extract the content of the tar file to your home folder.
- Open a terminal and type the following:
Usage
Go to “Applications -> Accessories -> WeatherPaper“. You should see that your desktop wallpaper is immediately changed to reflect the current weather condition. To configure the weatherpaper script, go to “Applications -> Accessories -> WP Settings Editor” Things that you can configure include: Service Here is where you can start/stop the weatherpaper service. You can also make it run on startup.
Location Here is where you enter your location so it can fetch the correct weather condition for the place you are located. You will need to enter your US zip code (if you are located in the US) or your weather location ID.
To retrieve your location ID, go to weather.com, enter your city (or country) in the search field. On the URL, you will see your weather location ID.
Themes The weatherpaper script comes with the default tango theme that shows the various weather condition. There is no gallery or image library where you can download new themes, but you can easily create one on your own.
General The last tab is where you configure the interval for the script to check the weather condition and whether it should display the temperature in Celcius or Farenheit.
Overall, this is a simple yet functional wallpaper script for those who need to get hold of the weather condition regularly. I don’t use it as the default though since the place I am located is sunny throughout the year. The ability to create your own wallpaper pack is also a great feature in the script. If you have created a nice wallpaper pack, feel free to share it with us in the comments. image credit: Mooganic
