Variety

lightdm support

Asked by raulpetrut

Add support for lightdm changing wallpapers.
Wallch allready did this.
thnx in advanced

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Peter Levi (peterlevi) said : 		#1

Do you mean that you want the chosen wallpaper to be used on your login screen? Please clarify your question.

If yes, I think the problem is in LightDM, or rather even in file permissions, not in Variety - LightDM expects the image to be accessible by the lightdm user, so it is not able to use images in your .config/variety folder, where Variety downloads to by default. If for example you set Variety to use the images in /usr/share/backgrounds, which are in your root partition and accessible by everyone and Variety sets your wallpaper from there, LightDM will also display it.

To be fair, after some reading and playing with this, I'm not yet completely sure as to what exactly is necessary for LightDM to be able to use a specific image.

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raulpetrut (mormope) said : 		#2

Now it works.
First time when i install variety, lightdm did not display wallpaper, but after reboot lightdm uses the same wallpaper as variety.
Thanks.

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Peter Levi (peterlevi) said : 		#3

I played some more with this.
There are some conditions for lightdm to use the background picture:

1. "Other" users need to have access to the file. In my case, Variety uses the default download location ~/.config/variety/Downloaded, By default only I have access to those files (they are in my home). So I tried granting other users access to my home folder, to ~/.config, and to ~/.config/variety - i.e. all the folders in the path and now lightdm uses the images set by Variety.

2. It seems it needs to be on the main drive, not on a mounted partition
My Favorites are on a mounted external partition and lightdm does not use those pictures. Probably the mount uid, gid and masks options play a role here - maybe this boils down to the same as 1 - that the other users don't have the proper permissions over these files.

Probably a good setup would be to have some global folder (on the main partition, e.g. /pics), readable and writable by everyone, and then configure Variety to download inside it, and also to keep Favorites there. This works OK for lightdm. However Variety cannot enforce this setup at installation, as it can only write inside the user's home folder.

(From this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/variety/+bug/1066113)