GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Backgrounds

The Gnome background can be set from the desktop with the right mouse button menu. Choose Change Desktop Background.

Suppose you have a bunch of background images in /home/share/backgrounds. The following command will randomly choose one to display. You could put this as a cron job to run each hour!

  $ gconftool -t str -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename \
    "`find /home/share/backgrounds | random | tail -n 1`"